Monday, February 20, 2012

Pharmacy And Technology

I was just reading an article entitled: CDC Launches New System for Tracking Antibiotics in Hospitals in the February edition of Pharmacy Practice News and thought I would post the following excerpt from that article -
For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will be electronically tracking hospitals’ use of antimicrobial medications, using a new national system known as the AU (antimicrobial use) Initiative, part of the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network.

The new system requires very little additional effort on the part of hospital pharmacists: Data on antimicrobial use can be automatically captured and reported from the medication administration record via clinical document architecture.

Be sure to read the whole article. Does it seem like some of your "colleagues" are holding you in contempt and trying to remove you from the picture? You decide.

I also recently came across the following video, and an accompanying link to an article written by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky about an experiment which had to do with Artificial Intelligence. I thought it might provide some good food for thought about how technology is impacting the profession.

According to BLR -

In a near future, man will have given birth to machines that are able to rewrite their codes, to improve themselves, and, why not, to dispense with them. This idea sounded a little bit distant to some critic voices, so an experiment was to be done: keep the AI sealed in a box from which it could not get out except by one mean: convincing a human guardian to let it out.

What if, as Yudkowsky states, ‘Humans are not secure’? Could we chess match our best creation to grant our own survival? Would man be humble enough to accept he was superseded, to look for primitive ways to find himself back, to cure himself from a disease that’s on his own genes? How to capture a force we voluntarily set free? What if mankind worst enemy were humans?

In a near future, we will cease to be the dominant race.

In a near future, we will learn to fear what is to come.


Keloid Trailer - A Short Film by BLR from BLR_VFX on Vimeo.

1 comment:

  1. It's not just pharmacists worrying about being replaced. Surgeons are looking over their shoulders too.

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