OBJECTIVE To describe the legal, professional, and consumer status of prescribers dispensing legend and over-the-counter drugs in the United States. METHODS Legal and academic databases were searched to identify those states that permit prescribers to dispense medications to patients and any limitations on such practice. In addition, prescribers and patients-consumers were surveyed to learn a...

Background: Information about the billions of prescriptions written for patients each year is collected in large datasets. Drug classification systems (DCSs) are key to analyzing these datasets. However, their ability to support such analyses has not been studied. Methods: We identified six desirable features for drug classification systems (DCSs) from the perspective of analyzing large drug pr...

There have been frequent suggestions over the last few years that a national inpatient drug chart is needed for the UK NHS. Here we draw on The Hunting of the Snark, Lewis Caroll’s nonsense poem, described by Caroll as ‘An Agony, in Eight Fits’, to critique this movement, where Agony is used ‘in the old sense of a struggle that involves great anguish, bodily pain or death.’ In most UK hospitals...

The French national agency for old age pensions has evolved, along a systemic vision of all the issues to be covered, a generic set of tools to design and process structured file formats. This set of tools has turned into a production grade modeling and validating suite which relies for its distribution on the continuous integration of its various components. As such, continuous integration has...

With a deadline of June 1, 2004, looming for the beginning of the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan (PDP) Discount Card program, a consortium of more than 30 organizations cosponsored the National Medicare Prescription Drug Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, from February 25–27, 2004. The main objective was to assess the various areas of health care that will be affected by the new Medic...