Prescription drug shipments to be tagged electronically
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WASHINGTON - Three large drug manufacturers in the United States say they plan to add radio transmitter tags to bottles of pills to prevent counterfeiting and theft.
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The Food and Drug Administration announced an initiative to prevent theft and counterfeiting of prescription drugs through the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
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A U.S. group charged with helping to develop Medicare guidelines released a proposal on Thursday classifying medicines in groups that could determine how likely certain drugs would be covered under a new prescription drug benefit.
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WASHINGTON - Impotence drug Viagra may soon carry radio chip tracking devices under an American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) initiative to prevent theft and counterfeiting.
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(InfoWorld) - Two large health insurance trade groups based in the U.S. have released a model for personal health records, a portable, Web-based tool that includes a customer's insurance claims, immunization records, medication records and other health information. America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, whose members provide health insurance to about two thirds of U.S. residents, unveiled the personal health record model Wednesday. The two groups saw the importance of working together on the project, said Susan Pisano, vice president of communications for AHIP. "This is really an effort that cries out for collaboration," she said. U.S. President George Bush has pushed for electronic health records to be available to all U.S. residents by 2014. Backers of such records say they will improve the efficiency of the U.S. health-care system and cut down on errors such as drug interaction problems. Personal health records, or PHRs, "may be one of our most important contributions to helping improve health care," Ronald Williams chairman, chief executive and president of insurer Aetna Inc., said in a statement. PHRs are similar to other electronic health records, although they include less specific treatment information. Electronic health records typically are used by health-care providers to store and manage detailed clinical information. Patients will be able to enter information into their PHRs, in addition to information from pharmacies, laboratories and medical providers, the groups said. The model released Wednesday includes definitions of data elements that should be included in PHRs, such as risk factors, family history, health-care facilities and medications taken. The model also includes standards for the PHRs to be portable between insurers and providers, and rules about when insurers can share the information. Insurers can send the information to a new insurer only after the patient gives consent and has enrolled in the new insurance plan, Pisano said. Those tight sharing rules were designed to address concerns about the PHRs used by insurance underwriters, she said. The PHR model also set 2008 as the deadline for insurers to incorporate the data elements and adopt the portability standards, she added. The groups said the U.S. is still "many years" away from a fully interoperable health records system. But Dr. Robert Kolodner, interim national coordinator for health information technology at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, praised the groups' efforts. The new model is a "step forward in the national health IT agenda," he said in a statement. Earlier this month, five major corporations -- Applied Materials Inc., British Petroleum America Inc., Intel Corp., Pitney Bowes Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. -- announced plans to fund the development of a Web-based system that would allow their employees and retirees to access and maintain personal medical records. The companies said the plan could help them cut health-care costs.
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Medical research often leads to unexpected breakthroughs in other peripheral areas.Based on the success being enjoyed by a project developed among a handful of leading pharmacy industry players, some experts say that you can add enhanced data security to the long list of advancements attributable to the health care industry.Founded in 2001, RxHub was the brainchild of three of the nation's largest pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) -- companies responsible for handling the unseen legwork necessary to allow pharmacies to dole out prescriptions to eligible consumers, and for customers to employ their health care benefits to cover related expenses.Those companies -- AdvancePCS (since acquired by CVS-Caremark), Express Scripts, and Medco Health Solutions -- were looking for a way to better facilitate the massive volumes of data transfer needed to match customers with their medical, insurance, and payment records to cut costs and eliminate potential mistakes.In creating RxHub, a joint venture that serves as an electronic clearinghouse responsible for gathering the medical and benefits data needed to serve customers, people involved with the project claim that the pharmacy companies also pioneered an information-sharing model that other businesses may want to emulate to relieve their own data security headaches.At its core, RxHub claims to be a universal communication framework that links health care providers, insurance companies, the PBMs, and local pharmacies for the purpose of sharing electronic records and prescription data.One of the most attractive side benefits of the venture, backers claim, is that it in addition to streamlining that process, the effort has also helped the partners pilot a new manner in which to access and correlate sensitive information to protect the interests of the many businesses and customers they serve.Rather than forcing any of the firms in the prescription drug food chain to create additional databases for the purpose of providing records to their various external partners, RxHub serves in a data transport role that mines information from all the sources in real time to process transactions, without ever aggregating the information itself.Built around master data management software provided by vendor Initiate Systems, the RxHub infrastructure allows the involved parties to perform all the records validation work necessary for pharmacies to verify prescription and payment information in a matter of seconds, without demanding that anyone in the ecosystem create or retain any additional records.In doing so, the system allows the companies to live up to the demands of regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), while protecting themselves from potential data leakage incidents, RxHub executives said."The idea was to create a hub for all of this sensitive data without ever creating a master database where the information itself would be stored; we're more like FedEx, we look at the routing information, handle the package, and get it there reliably," said JP Little, chief executive of RxHub."We've been very careful about how we architected these systems and our business itself from the get-go in terms of not wanting to retain any data," he said. "This work was being done before we existed, but there was no hub; serving that role in the middle, the responsibility for security and controls remains with that various stakeholders, and the risk is lowered across the entire process."RxHub effectively specializes in real-time data mining, built on Initiate's Enterprise Master Person Index (EMPI) technology.When a patient requests a prescription at a pharmacy using the tools -- which currently cover an estimated 135 million U.S. consumers -- the transaction is pushed through RxHub, which in turn verifies the involved person's information wherever it is stored by the various PBMs and health care providers involved.Rather than creating a central record of all of that data, or storing any related information itself, the company merely delivers the relevant results regarding eligibility and payment details to the pharmacy, which can dole out the involved medicines and patient benefits.?By eliminating the need to create additional databases of patient information throughout all the businesses involved, both the companies themselves and consumers covered by the system are less likely to become victimized by leakage events or attacks, proponents of the system say."A hacker would need to break into one of the PBMs or some other element of the overall prescribing system to get this data, we don't actually have it," Little said. "The idea is to eliminate the need to create additional databases; we access the data needed to carry out the transaction from all these different sources, but we never retain it; that's the beauty of this type of an industry hub model."Officials with Initiate say that the distributed architecture approach being utilized by the pharmacy sector is catching on throughout a number of other areas within the health care industry, including some government projects.Driven primarily by concerns around HIPAA and other regulations in the health care sector, company officials said that similar mandates in other markets such as the financial services space and even the law enforcement industry are driving interest from other types of organizations."With this type of data mining, companies are able to tie together separate systems in a real-time environment without putting themselves at risk of a data leakage event or an attack on the information," said Scott Schumacher, chief scientist for Initiate."Companies can create centralized registries for these types of customer records that gather the data from source systems without ever disturbing it, or retaining anything that could be used to carry out fraud," he said. "We believe that along with a number of other benefits to business, this approach also creates a more dynamic security model for data sharing, and we're hearing from many different types of organizations today who have an interest in doing something similar."Schumacher said that Initiate typically competes for deals with IT industry giants IBM and Oracle, which have built similar systems for fostering secure information federation among business partners.And some industry watchers agree that the strategy adopted by RxHub in the pharmacy business could appeal to other types of firms, in particular retailers, as they struggle with issues of data retention, protection, and regulatory compliance."This type of approach is already being used in the public sector, intelligence community, and in the financial services industry," said Ray Wang, analyst at Forrester Research. "Whether it is tracking down suspects or identifying risk among credit bureaus, in effect, the idea is to find a quick match and link without the saving of data to ensure that no information is inappropriately saved, or can be leaked."
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The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued final regulations on the establishment and maintenance of records to protect the US human food and animal feed supply in the event of credible threats of serious adverse health consequences or death to
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The Food and Drug Administration gives doctors the go-ahead to implant radio frequency microchips in patients. When scanned, the chips will release patients' medical information to doctors, speeding care.
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With the click of a computer mouse, visitors to government Web sites in four states can fill orders for prescription drugs from private pharmacies in Canada.
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Regulators sign off on implantable tracking device to manage treatment of Alzheimer's, diabetes, heart disease, other conditions.
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in conjunction with several major drug companies, is working on an initiative that would involve fitting medicine bottles with tiny antennas to prevent fraud and counterfeiting, the New York Times reported Nov. 15.
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The Food and Drug Administration would gain new authority to ensure the safety of prescription drugs, including the power to mandate label changes that warn of newly emerging risks, under a bill passed Wednesday by the House.
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THURSDAY, June 21 (HealthDay News) -- A programmable device that allows professional caregivers to monitor how patients dispense their medications has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the agency said Thursday.
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Happy Holidays! Have some drug-enhancing technology.
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A computerized pill box that patients can keep at home to dole out their drugs on schedule and in the correct doses received federal approval Thursday.
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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today cleared for marketing the first laboratory test system that will allow physicians to consider unique genetic information from patients in selecting medications and doses of medications for a wide variety of
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Gov. Kathleen Sebelius on Tuesday rolled out a program that will allow Kansans to buy prescription drugs from other countries over the Internet.