NEW JERSEY SOCIETY OF HEALTH-SYSTEM PHARMACISTS

2012 ANNUAL MEETING/EXHIBITION & INSTALLATION DINNER

FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2012

HILTON EAST BRUNSWICK
3 TOWER CENTER BLVD.
EAST BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY
(732) 828-2000

NJSHP is now accepting nominations for state-level officers. Are you interested in getting more involved with NJSHP? Do you know someone who would be great in the following positions? Now’s the time for you to get more involved or nominate a fellow peer. NJSHP can even help you prepare your nomination. Here are the available positions:

* President-Elect (1)
This leadership position offers an individual the opportunity to direct our organization. Term of president-elect is for one year, after which this position assumes the presidency.

* Secretary (1)
This position records the minutes of the Board’s monthly meetings. Additional functions are secondary to the secretary’s participation in other NJSHP related affairs.

* Director of the Council (2)
Two positions will be available. One involves the council on organizational affairs, and the other, council on public policy. Both positions allow an individual with the right motivation to have an impact on the course of the profession of pharmacy practice.

If you want more information about serving as a state-level officer, contact Stella Williams, Administrative Director, at (609) 936-2205 or swilliam@njha.com

North Chapter

February 29, 2012
Topic: Principles of Genomics, Human Gene Transfer, and Pharmacogenomics
Location: The Valley Hospital
223 North Van Dien Avenue
Ridgewood, NJ
Time: 5:30pm - 8:00pm
Speaker: Carlo Lupano, RPh, BsPharm, MBA, CCP.
Pharmacy Manager
The Valley Hospital
Ridgewood, NJ

North Central Chapter

February 2012
Topic: Pharmacotherapy Management of Psychiatric Illness
Location: TBA
Time: TBA
Speaker: Mei T. Liu, PharmD, BCPP
Clinical Pharmacist
University Medical Center at Princeton
Princeton, NJ
Clinical Assistant Professor
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Piscataway, NJ

Central Chapter

February 29, 2012
Topic: Update on Antifungal Therapy
Location: Crowne Plaza Edison
2055 Lincoln Highway
Edison, NJ
Time: 6:30 - 8:00pm
Speaker: Monica Shah, PharmD
Clinical Pharmacist - Infectious Diseases
Newark Beth Israel Medical Center
Newark, NJ

Become a Member Today Just fill out the membership application and return it to the NJSHP office. You will be joining more than 1,200 other New Jersey pharmacy professionals who are benefiting from NSHP's outstanding services!

Click here for the application form.

Celebrate your hard work and dedication in your pharmacy career! Share your accomplishments with NJSHP! Our monthly Newsbriefs is an excellent opportunity to provide education and information about your contributions to the practice of pharmacy. Your story can be an inspiration to others! So don’t be shy. To submit your contribution, please contact Stella Williams at 609-936-2205 or email at swilliam@njha.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Going Green has too many advantages we just couldn't resist!

•You will receive information more timely without the hassles of snail mail.
•Look for our meeting notices and newsletters to arrive in your e-mail so you can print or view.
•With our savings, we'll have more funds to enhance our member programs.
•Plus, going electronic is a great boost for the environment!

[February 1, 2012, AJHP News] Kate Traynor, BETHESDA, MD 18 January 2012 - A total of 37 new molecular entities, vaccines, and blood products won FDA marketing approval last year, compared with 29 in the previous year. Highlights of several of the approved medications appear below. A full list of new products and their indications appears below.

Advances in cancer. 2011 saw the approval of nine cancer treatments, including two-Pfizer’s kinase inhibitor crizotinib and Genentech’s vemurafenib-that FDA officials heralded as groundbreaking developments in personalized medicine.

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[February 1, 2012, AJHP News] Kate Traynor, BETHESDA, MD 18 January 2012 - As pharmacy practice evolves, so do the strategies that help drive those changes-including the ambitious and comprehensive Pharmacy Practice Model Initiative (PPMI), which has supplanted ASHP's 2015 Initiative.

Launched in 2003, ASHP's Health-System Pharmacy 2015 Initiative was a member-driven plan "structured to help us reach the ASHP vision for pharmacy practice in hospitals and health systems," said ASHP's Douglas Scheckelhoff, vice president of professional development.

The most recent version of the 2015 Initiative consisted of six goals and 31 related objectives. In general, the 2015 Initiative emphasized the pharmacist's role in promoting public health and ensuring that medication use is safe, effective, and based on scientific evidence.

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U.S. Surgeon General Endorses Comprehensive Report on Current Pharmacy Practice - 1/10/2012 - The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) strongly supports the concepts outlined in the recently released report, "Improving Patient and Health System Outcomes through Advanced Pharmacy Practice-A Report to the U.S. Surgeon General 2011."

Using examples from public and private sector practice models, the report examines the contemporary roles of pharmacists as members of health care teams. The authors note that although evidence demonstrates that pharmacists who are involved in innovative care and payment models can improve patient outcomes and reduce demands affecting the healthcare system, policy and legislative barriers exist that impede their broad utilization.

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FDA Issues Safety Guidelines For Incorrectly Packaged Pain Medication

1/9/2012 - A shutdown of the Novartis facility that manufactures Endo oral pain medications was announced today by both Endo and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The action was prompted by rare reports that one or more doses of the wrong medication were found in bottles or unit dose packages as well as packaging problem noted by FDA during a mid-December inspection. Affected products include oxymorphone, oxycodone with acetaminophen or aspirin, morphine extended release, and hydrocodone with acetaminophen.

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The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) has joined forces with the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) to improve coordination in care transitions and reduce hospital readmissions. The Management in Care Transitions Project is accepting submissions for care models involving pharmacists until Jan. 18. The submissions will be reviewed by an expert panel that will select up to six care transitions for development into case studies. The panel will subsequently outline key elements of the best programs and make recommendations for strategies by late spring 2012. “Utilizing pharmacists' expertise is key in reducing the number of hospital readmissions, many of which are the result of medication-related problems,” says ASHP Executive Vice President and CEO Paul W. Abramowitz, PharmD, FASHP. “Pharmacists' medication therapy management services can help prevent overuse, underuse, and inappropriate use of healthcare services that might otherwise lead to costly readmissions.”

The FDA has approved a single shared Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for transmucosal immediate-release fentanyl (TIRF) products, called the TIRF REMS Access Program. This new shared system will replace the individual REMS for each of these products, allowing prescribers and pharmacies to enroll into just one system. The program will be officially launched in March, 2012. Health care professionals who prescribe TIRF medicines that will only be used in an inpatient setting (hospitals, hospices, or long-term care facilities) will not be required to enroll in the TIRF REMS Access program. Similarly, patients who receive TIRF medicines in an inpatient setting are not required to enroll in the program. Long term care and hospice patients who obtain their medications from outpatient pharmacies must still be enrolled.

A new report released by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) indicates that approximately 86 percent of adverse events that occur in hospitals are not submitted to centralized reporting systems designed to improve patient safety and quality of care. For 62 percent of these events, staff said they did not believe they were reportable. Unreported incidents-- some of which were fatal-- included hospital-acquired infections and four cases of excessive bleeding due to the administration of anticoagulants. Study authors recommend that the HHS develops a master list of potentially reportable adverse events to eliminate any confusion. They have also called for guidance for organizations that survey or accredit hospitals on assessing incident reporting systems and the use of the master list. None of the three organizations that currently accredit hospitals have standardized lists of reportable adverse events.

The University of South Carolina has announced that more than 800 students have already applied to be part of the first class at its new School of Medicine in Greenville. The school has also received 300 applications for basic faculty positions, six of which have been filled thus far. The medical school is scheduled to open in summer 2012 with a first class of 50 students. The school will also support the South Carolina College of Pharmacy.

The FDA has issued a safety advisory regarding opiate products manufactured and packaged for Endo Pharmaceuticals by Novartis Consumer Health at its Lincoln, Nebraska manufacturing site. Due to problems that occurred when these products were packaged and labeled at the site, tablets from one product type may have carried over into packaging of another product. This could result in a stray pill of one medicine ending up in the bottle of another product. Medications affected by the advisory include oxymorphone hydrochloride (Opana ER), oxymorphone hydrochloride (Opana), oxycodone hydrochloride and acetaminophen (Percocet), oxycodone hydrochloride and aspirin (Percodan), morphine sulfate, and hydrocodone bitartrate/acetaminophen tablets (Zydone).

Dr. Ludwik Fedorko, anesthesia provider at the University Health Network’s (UHN) Toronto General Hospital in Canada, has referred to the operating room (OR) as a "black hole of medication safety." Fedorko discussed the problem during a session on OR drug safety at the 2011 American Society of Health-System Pharmacists December meeting. The OR and the post-anesthesia care unit disproportionately accounted for 81 percent of all medication error reports compared to the rest of the hospital. More than 60 percent of drug-related errors from anesthesiology providers involve the removal of incorrect vials from anesthesia drug trays, incorrect syringe labeling after admixing, and syringe swaps during surgery. UHN established a pharmacy-anesthesia collaboration to explore a point-of-care, computer-aided syringe labeling and verification process. In January 2010, all 20 ORs at Toronto General implemented the system. The process requires the scanning of every drug ampoule and syringe label for accuracy verification during dispensing, premixing, administration, and documentation. After 23 months of use in more than 20,000 surgical cases, no medication error incidents related to mistaken drug identity were reported when bar-code scanning was used. One critical drug error occurred when the bar-code scanning process was bypassed, however.

An interdisciplinary team approach can improve health outcomes for infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD), a common complication of prematurity. At Nationwide Children's Hospital in Ohio, a team of experts established the Comprehensive Center for Bronchopulmonary Dysplasia (CCBPD) in 2004. For this study, researchers looked at the outcomes for more than 100 neonatal intensive-care unit infants with the most severe forms of BPD treated at the CCBPD. These infants' developmental scores were significantly higher than the national average; readmission rates also dropped from 29 percent to 5 percent after the CCBPD was established. The center's interdisciplinary BPD team included experts such as nurse practitioners, neonatologists, pulmonologists, social workers, pharmacists, and pediatricians to address the infant's individual needs. Despite the highly individualized care of each infant in the CCBPD, several key principles apply: prevention of infection, prevention of right heart failure, optimal nutrition, intensive neurodevelopmental assistance, and minimal-impact respiratory support. The study is published in the Journal of Perinatology.

Tennessee state Sen. Ken Yager has proposed legislation that would require doctors and pharmacists to check a state database before issuing or filling prescriptions for potentially addictive pain medications. The Republican lawmaker, who chairs the Senate State and Local Government Committee, said he is also drafting a bill that would require persons picking up a prescription for designed medications to present photo identification.

The FDA has issued a notification that additional concentrations of liquid acetaminophen marketed for infants are now available. This change in the concentration will affect the amount of liquid given to an infant, and the agency has called on healthcare professionals to advise caregivers of the change to prevent errors, particularly if they are accustomed to using 80 mg/0.8 mL or 80 mg/mL concentrations.

Pharmacies in Washington state have been sending information into a giant computer database, detailing every prescription they've dispensed for controlled substances since October. Beginning this week, pharmacists, doctors and other prescribers will be able to see all such drugs a patient is getting anywhere in the state, even if the person pays with cash. The state's new Prescription Monitoring Program will list all the doctors prescribing the pills and includes a color-coded map showing every place the patient got drugs. The program is funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the department has warned the state not to expect ongoing funding. So state health officials came to lawmakers last month to ask them to rescind the provision banning provider fees. The program is estimated to cost $530,000 per year, according to state Department of Health Secretary Mary Selecky. Prescribers would share those costs under the proposal. Julie Akers, a pharmacist who testified at a recent hearing on the matter, supports the program. But pharmacists, who are required to enter data, do that without reimbursement. Some must pay for data entry, she says, so for the state to tack on more expense "just doesn't make sense."