A Brief Look at Common Prescription Label Abbreviations

The former chairman of the Worldwide Generics Pharmaceutical Industry Association, John Klein currently chairs Cambridge Therapeutics, a Teaneck, New Jersey, firm he founded in 2011. An entrepreneur and executive with decades of industry experience, he also serves as a trustee of the state’s Hackensack Meridian Health Hospitals. John Klein’s focus at Cambridge Therapeutics is to make physicians’ and patients’ lives easier through innovative prescription dosage packaging that minimizes frustration while promoting organization and safety. 

For today’s patients, such convenience is key to adherence to a medical regimen. Yet many people are unfamiliar with the standard abbreviations and Latin-derived code words on their own prescriptions. Here is a brief summary of some of the most common of these:

-If a doctor writes AC (“ante cibum” in Latin), he or she is instructing a patient to take the medication before meals. PC means “post cibum,” or after meals.
-If the physician wants a medication taken at bedtime, the prescription may say HS, for “hora somni.” 
-BID means “twice a day,” and comes from the Latin “bis in die.”
-PRN translates as “as needed,” and is from the Latin phrase “pro re nata.”
O.D. (“oculus dexter”), can mean “right eye,” just as O.S. (“oculus sinister”) means “left eye.” O.U. stands for “oculus uterque,” or “both eyes.”

Today’s prescriptions typically translate these obscure notations, and patients should always consult a qualified pharmacist or physician to clarify instructions.

Pharmaceutical Industry Takes Increasing Patient Focus

At Cambridge Therapeutics, Chairman John Klein and his team have produced a range of innovations in drug packaging that improve patient adherence to their prescription regimens. This focus on making dosage and usage simple and easy to understand for a patient or caregiver is in keeping with a growing trend in the pharmaceutical industry. John Klein and Cambridge Therapeutics understand that putting people first is not only the right thing to do: it makes sound business sense in today’s consumer-powered marketplace.

In noting this trend, experts point out that in the heavily regulated pharmaceutical industry, patient input into new drug approval and access to markets can make or break a product. In this environment, the issue of maintaining quality while containing costs has generated urgent concern on the part of patients. One result: Pharmaceutical firms now routinely bring patients into the discussion at multiple stages of product development and launch. 

According to a number of experts, strategic leveraging of this emerging patient-centric worldview can produce increasingly high-value, affordable treatments, as well as greater adherence, improved healthcare outcomes, and better patient satisfaction. 

Forward-thinking pharmaceutical firms that have set these as desired goals are better poised to take advantage of today’s democratized marketplace, in which patients empower themselves through greater access to information, advocacy groups, and online tools that amplify their voices.

Harvard Business School Case Studies Deepen Students’ Understanding

With decades of experience in the business side of the pharmaceutical sector, Cambridge Therapeutics’ Chairman John Klein works to offer consistently innovative, patient-centered products and packaging. Prior to his endeavors with Cambridge Therapeutics, he held senior executive roles with some of the world’s premier firms. John Klein received a Businessweek Corporate Turnaround of the Year Award for his work with Zenith Laboratories. His service as a Harvard Business School consultant resulted in three of the school’s famed case studies.

The HBS case-study method changes the way students, teachers, and practitioners think by offering them in-depth glimpses into the actual decision-making processes involved in corporate and organizational strategies. The case studies examine in detail the challenges faced by major organizations, putting a student into the role of a real executive faced with the same incomplete information, resource constraints, and time-management issues that arise in a real-world decision-maker’s life. As in the real world, a case study offers no simple or obvious solutions.

HBS bases its field cases on actual company situations, including “armchair” cases, derived from the lived experiences or scholarship of an instructor. “Library” cases draw on published works to create challenging scenarios.

Numerous HBS graduates have noted that the rigors of this method, and the case study work they have absorbed, have been high points in their education.

How a Canadian Pediatrician Revolutionized Prescription Safety

Cambridge Therapeutics Chairman John Klein and his team aim to provide physicians and their patients with high-quality, innovative, easy-to-manage prescription drug packaging that helps to increase patient compliance with any prescription drug regimen. A New Jersey-based company founded by John Klein in 2011, Cambridge Therapeutics puts the same level of care into ensuring that its packaging meets all applicable standards for child-resistance and safety.

Cambridge Therapeutics and its peers’ focus on ensuring safety and developing packaging that keeps prescription medications out of the hands of children has a history that extends back many decades.

In 1967, a Canadian physician, Dr. Henri Breault, patented his Palm-n-Turn prescription bottle lid. Dr. Breault began his work on the design after the tragic deaths of some 100 Canadian children every year due to accidental poisonings. As chief of pediatrics in a poison-control center at the Hotel Dieu Hospital, he had handled numerous cases in which he had to pump children’s stomachs to save their lives.

Dr. Breault’s lid is credited for a 25 percent lowering of the rate of accidental poisonings of children in the province of Ontario. Other Canadian provinces adopted it, and the United States established regulations in 1970 that required such child-resistant designs on some prescription medications. Worldwide adoption of the design led to some governments’ additional requirements that dangerous home products such as bleach also be packaged in child-resistant containers.

Dr. Breault died in 1983, but his impact on child safety has been compared to that of Jonas Salk on fighting polio.

Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition

As the chairman of Cambridge Therapeutics, John Klein leverages his extensive background in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries to guide the strategic direction of the company. Outside of his pursuits at Cambridge Therapeutics, John Klein has provided consulting services to Harvard Business School on strategic ways to improve competitiveness.

One program that Harvard Business School offers to students is its annual New Venture Competition. Featuring a $300,000 prize, the competition provides student teams with the opportunity to present a new idea for a business or a social enterprise. To compete in the business track, teams must include at least one current Harvard Business School MBA student to play a lead role in the business and serve as a major equity holder. 

For the social enterprise track, teams must consist primarily of Harvard University graduate students who hold meaningful roles in the proposed organization. For social enterprise entries, one team member must meet these qualifications: be a Harvard Business School MBA student, either a Center for Public Leadership fellow or Adrian Cheng fellow, or a Harvard graduate student taking certain courses. In addition to the student competitions, HBS alumni can enter regional New Venture Competitions with cash prizes of $100,000.

Novel Drug Delivery System May Boost Effectiveness of Cancer Treatment

An accomplished pharmaceutical executive based in Teaneck, New Jersey, John Klein is the chairman of Cambridge Therapeutics. In his capacity with Cambridge Therapeutics, he oversees the development of novel drug delivery systems and combination drug therapies. John Klein also keeps up with industry news related to areas such as novel drug delivery systems.

A new and exciting frontier in the field of pharmaceuticals, novel drug delivery systems aim to improve therapeutic efficacy and increase patients’ compliance with their prescribed regimens. New advancements in the field are happening at Virginia Tech, where faculty researchers have developed a novel drug delivery system with the potential to enhance cancer treatment options.

Current treatments that involve injecting nanoparticle drugs into patients have limited effectiveness because few of those nanoparticles reach the cancer site. On the other hand, through the new Nanoscale Bacteria-Enabled Autonomous Drug Delivery System (NanoBEADS), anti-cancer nanoparticle drugs are chemically attached to attenuated bacteria cells, which boosts the effectiveness of the treatment by allowing more of the therapeutic agents to reach the cancer site.

The Benefits of Physician Prescription Dispensing

Based in Teaneck, New Jersey, John Klein is the chairman of Cambridge Therapeutics, where he draws on his experience in the health care and pharmaceutical industries to guide the organization. Under John Klein’s direction, Cambridge Therapeutics focuses on providing innovative health care solutions, including novel drug delivery systems and physician prescription dispensing.

Physicians who opt to dispense from their own offices the medications that they prescribe can obtain a revenue boost. Given that the National Center for Health Statistics estimates that a typical physician writes approximately 35 prescriptions daily, adding a $10 handling surcharge on each one could result in up to $350 or more in additional daily revenue without using any additional physician time.

In addition to being more profitable for the physician’s practice and investors, physician-dispensed prescriptions offer increased convenience to patients because they can receive their medications at the point of care rather than waiting in line at the pharmacy. Prescriptions dispensed in a doctor’s office also may also help to increase adherence to medication regimens. Currently, as many as 31 percent of new prescriptions go unfilled by patients, according to the Journal of General Internal Medicine.