Wednesday, February 20, 2019
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.
Wednesday, February 13, 2019
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.
Sunday, February 10, 2019
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.
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.
Friday, February 1, 2019
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.
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