PHARMACIST STEVE

My mind works is mysterious ways… From all my years of writing software, in that environment, it is referred to as “background tasks”. My mind seems to collect bits and pieces of data from may appear on the surface to have no connection to each other, my mind will try to create over time a “mental picture” of some concept.

If you ever got a email from me you will see this quote as a tag line at the bottom of all emails:

“The fellow that can only see a week ahead is always the popular fellow,
for he is looking with the crowd. But the one that can see years ahead,
he has a telescope, but he can’t make anybody believe that he has it..” Will Rogers

After I read the Citizen Petition on Narxcare below, it confirmed what I suspected of Narxcare after I read some of their initial press releases a few years back. Not to long ago, I read where Narxcare had moved all of their databases OFF SHORE and according to Wikipedia.. their HQ in in DUBLIN, IRELAND.. where our HIPAA LAWS do not apply. 

I was sitting at my desk and my laptop and up popped a email  – YOUR FICO SCORE HAS CHANGED – all of sudden a large piece of a puzzle apparently my mind had been working on in my subconscious.  WTF, Experian is same entity that generates my FICO score and owns Narxcare and has information on 235 million Americans… which is near or all  adults ( >18 y/o) in the USA. What if this company has links to the huge EMR systems – like Epic – which I understand is one of the most used in large hospital system with a lot of outlying office practices.

And they send notices to these EMR systems … this pt’s Narxcare score as increased, and the particular hospital system has a process that puts different color flags on the pt’s medical records in the system- based on their Narxcare score – to alert any prescriber in their system.. that a particular pt’s Narxcare score has increased and it has exceeded the hospital’s “line in the sand” and won’t let any of their employee prescribers to prescribe certain medications and/or above certain mgs/day of certain medications.

The algorithms that Narxcare uses to come up with “addiction risk score” are proprietary (SECRET), I suspect that getting them to untangle more than one pt’s data being mixed together could be nearly impossible to get corrected.  The hyperlink to the petition below outlines what pt data points that Narxcare tracks are known and lists some of the potential databases that Narxcare could use to gather pt’s data points.

Yet many in healthcare are functioning under a confirmation basis, that it is probably right/correct data so much of the time, that it is correct all the time and won’t challenge what seems “not normal” on a particular pt’s Narxcare score. Nothing is perfect, how many pts may or could be harmed by mixed up pt data points ?

FDA citizen petition to deem the Bamboo Health (“Bamboo”) NarxCare software a misbranded device

Experian is a multinational data analytics and consumer credit reporting company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. Experian collects and aggregates information on over 1 billion people and businesses including 235 million individual U.S. consumers and more than 25 million U.S. businesses  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experian

 

 

Filed under: General Problems