A pharmacist discovered the mistake, and it was a big one. Gone unnoticed, the error would have corrupted an entire clinical trial. The detection occurred at the outset of a phase I gene therapy trial at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey (CINJ) in New Brunswick. Patients with carcinoma of the bladder were to receive [...]

In 1998, Richard Sakai, Pharm.D., FASHP, FCSHP, became the director of pharmacy service at the 358-bed Children’s Hospital Central California (CHCC) in Madera. For Dr. Sakai, it was a homecoming of sorts. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had left the same hospital to continue his career at several other health systems across California. On his [...]

Numbers alone rarely tell the whole story, but for the University of Wisconsin (UW) Health in Madison, they offer a tantalizing glimpse of a remarkable transformation. Within one year: •  Postoperative venous thromboembolisms (VTEs) per 1,000 patients fell from 11.6 to 6.6. •  Within its 39 primary care clinics, the percentage of patients whose INR [...]

On Feb. 11, six pharmacy students and two faculty members from the University of Utah College of Pharmacy boarded a flight out of a snow-covered Salt Lake City. Twenty-four hours and more than 8,100 miles later, they stepped into the tropical pandemonium of Bangkok, Thailand, and its 12 million residents. For the next five and [...]

Personalized medicine: It sounds like something you would read about in a novel or see in a movie. But recent scientific advances are leading to the identification of a growing number of genes implicated in diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity. In this issue of InterSections, we explore the role of pharmacists in [...]

A little over a year ago, I transitioned from a clinical faculty role to being a director of a hospital pharmacy department. I quickly found that the clinical skills in critical care that I had developed over the first dozen or so years of my career either applied just a little bit or not at [...]

ASHP and the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) are working together to improve patient outcomes by facilitating the involvement of pharmacists in medication-related transitions of care, from acute care to home settings. The associations recently launched the Medication Management in Care Transitions Project, which focuses on identifying and profiling existing best-practice models. Poorly coordinated care transitions [...]

More than 50 hours of on-demand continuing education are now available from ASHP Advantage. Browse listings of convenient on-demand educational activities, as well as publications, podcasts and live webinars. On-demand activities are based on educational symposia at the 46th Midyear Clinical Meeting in New Orleans. Newly available topics include antimicrobial stewardship in health systems, exploring [...]

ASHP is now offering an Apple iPad app that delivers convenient access to the Society’s extensive library of eBooks. The application was developed by Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content-delivery solutions. Members can download nearly 20 eBooks in ASHP’s library of professional educational materials from the eBooks page on ASHP’s website. ASHP will [...]