You can benchmark your facility’s current and projected compliance against that of your peers in PP&P’s State of Pharmacy Compounding, available at www.pppmag.com. With this report you can see how your compliance plan stacks up against those of like-sized hospitals, what others are paying for their pharmacy renovations, which products are most commonly outsourced, and where facilities are locating their CAIs, along with a myriad of other data. All of this information is presented in the style PP&P is known for — straightforward and easy-to-read — so you can get the information you need quickly.

In keeping with that approach, this issue of PP&P brings you two divergent, though equally important, articles on USP <797>:

• On page 16: Pharmacy’s Legal Liability and USP <797> examines the multiple enforcement actions that are possible, as well as risk-reduction strategies for minimizing pharmacy’s legal liability.

• Switching gears to the nitty-gritty, Best Practices and Budgeting for Cleanroom Wipers and Cleaning Agents on page 2, takes you through cleaning practices and product choices with tips for getting the most out of your budget.

Recognizing that safe compounding is but one of the many priorities facing directors of pharmacy, this month’s issue of PP&P also brings you articles on:

• Implementing a Hybrid Medication Distribution System , page 6

• Alerting Software: An Interim Solution to Smart Pump Implementation , page 26

Along with our regular Unit Dose Market Watch and New & Noteworthy features, this month’s Product Spotlights share Sentara Healthcare’s experience using MILT 3.0 to meet ancillary bar code unit dose packaging needs, and Clarion Hospitals’s implementation of McKesson’s high-capacity open matrix and detecting AcuDose-Rx drawers in support of their decentralized distribution model.

From ensuring regulatory compliance to choosing medication distribution systems and implementing new technologies, the amount of information necessary to make informed choices in today’s health-system pharmacy is considerable. Our goal at PP&P is to provide you with useful information and ideas that you can implement in your own facility.

In this vein, keep an eye out for a new report from PP&P. Going Green: A Field Report for Health-System Pharmacy will accompany your July issue and bring you up-to-date on yet another issue directors of pharmacy need to be informed about — environmental stewardship in pharmacy.

All the best,



R. Mitchell Halvorsen
Publisher