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CLINICAL
A hub for anticoagulation in rural areas .......................
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Micronutrients as therapy in the ICU ........
14
Optimizing nutrition in critically ill children .....
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Standardize 4 Safety initiative gains traction .................
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POLICY
COVID-19 takes a toll on sterile compounding ...............
22
A reimbursement checkup at the half-year mark ..............
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OPERATIONS & MGMT
Keeping the cold chain strong during COVID-19 ....................... 25 REVIEW ARTICLE
See page 8.
The Need for Biosimilars in Oncology: Challenges In Development See insert after page 14.
NYU Langone’s Lessons Learned While Fighting COVID-19 Pandemic B
eing at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, pharmacists at New York University (NYU) Langone Health discovered they had to quickly revamp many of their operating procedures, adapting their staffing ffing and oncall schedules, stocking drug cabinets abinets and purchasing orders to handle le the influx of severely ill patients. But those tasks weren’t the only adjustments the team m had to make. NYU Langonee pharmacists also had to step up their presence on code response teams as patients’’ cardiopulmonary systems crashed rashed under the weight of COVID-19. 9. And they also had to support each h other with stepped-up wellness outreach to address the emotional toll of being front-line responders. As the COVID-19 surge started to mount, scheduling was the main priority. “It became very apparent that we needed to be on the floor to assist iin the direct patient care management
and day-to-day activities of our COVID ICU and acute care units,” said John Papadopoulos, PharmD, the director of clinical pharmacy services at the nearly 1,000-bed Tisch Kimmel campus, in New York City, during an ASHP webinar. He and his team soon realized Y tthis was going to be an “always on” preparedness push. Continued on page 6
Targeting potentially harmful pediatric medications T
Supportive Care After Hematopoietic Cell Transplant
Volume 47 • Number 6 • June 2020
As Beers List for Kids Debuts, New Research Replaces ‘Lore’
T
he publication of the Beers List in 1991 was a seminal event in the prevention of adverse drug events in older adults. Now, younger patients stand to benefit from a similarly ground-breaking effort in pediatrics. The KIDs (Key Potentially Inappropriate Drugs in Pediatrics) List, published this spring in the Journal of Pediatric Pharmacology and Therapeutics (2020;25[3]:175191), contains 67 drugs and 10 excipients that are potentially inappropriate for prescribing in all or some pediatric patients. David Hoff, PharmD, one of the KIDS List developers, said he first had an inkling of its need about 25 years ago, when he spent
ISMP alert: t:
Remdesivir i i E Error Points to Common Labeling Problem
time focusing on what medications should and should not be used in pediatric patients. In the ensuing years, he developed a list of drugs in his head acquired through the experience of his mentors, passed down like lore. “We learned it through verbal tradition, and took it on faith that what was being told to us was the truth,” said Dr. Hoff, a clinical leader at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, in Minneapolis. “Over time, I found that research seemed to confirm some of the drugs on my list that you should use with caution or avoid in kids, and seemed to refute others.”
onfusion over remdesivir vial labels was a prime factor in a compounding error that resulted in overdosing multiple COVID-19 patients at one unidentified hospital, according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices’ weekly Acute Care Medication Safety Alert!. “Like many investigational drug container labels,” the ISMP alert stated, the remdesivir vials were “not clearly labeled” and the information was “crowded and in a small font.”
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COVID-19 Pandemic More coverage: pages 12, 16, 22, 24, 25.
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