In the hospice industry, there have always been vendors that surface from every corner of the earth to try and provide a better product or service to hospice organizations. With this steady flow of new hospice vendors, it becomes quite competitive to gain hospice customers. With this, PDC Rx would like to layout our services in front of you with zero smoke and zero mirrors. There is no catch to the service we provide. And yes, we have to say that because people to this day still ask us - “So… what’s the catch?”

As a Hospice Pharmacy Benefit Manager, PDC Rx is always looking for new services that we can offer to our hospice customers. Decreasing pharmacy costs for our hospice customers is only a fraction of what we strive to accomplish. In recent years, faxing prescriptions has become more and more unaccepted when it comes to controlled substances. In fact, it is already illegal in several states.

A seizure occurs when excitatory neurons produce a sudden surge in electrical activity in the brain. Seizures can be caused by various underlying conditions, ranging from temporary conditions such as fever, infection, alcohol or medication withdrawal, hypoglycemia, electrolyte imbalance, head trauma, and more. In these cases, treating these underlying conditions will stop the seizure.

A lack of restful sleep contributes to poor health, and the advent of other chronic conditions including cardiovascular diseases, mood disorders, depression, and a weakened immune system. There are several sleep disorders in existence but insomnia is the most prevalent among hospice patients.

Nausea causes a person to not want to eat or drink anything and vomiting can cause dehydration. There is no magic pill that combats every type of mediator triggering nausea and/or vomiting. This is why it’s important to differentiate between the areas that feed into the vomiting center.

Technology is great…. until it has you looking at something curious in your poo. Believe it or not, there are several medications that mimic the corn phenomena – they come out of the body looking the same as they went in.

There are many common misconceptions, both in the general public and within the healthcare setting, regarding Hospice and Palliative Care.

Let’s take a second to clear this up!

Every hospice patient requires palliative care, which is the aggressive management of symptoms to keep our patients symptom-free and comfortable as they transition out of this world. Polypharmacy is the simultaneous use of multiple medications to manage the health of a patient. A similar complaint I hear from nurses and other healthcare providers, after listening to some of them, is how difficult it is sometimes to convince the patients’ caregivers about the importance of medication deprescribing.

National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6th and ends on May 12th, Florence Nightingale's birthday.

First of all, the celebrations are always during day shift… so night shift rarely participates. No complaints because the goal of a night shift nurse is to stay under the radar of the administration…

It is a bit of a struggle for me to delineate the years that comprise those who qualify as “Older Americans” because doing so means that I have to face the fact that I am one. My parents survived the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and World War II.

PDC Rx is honored to introduce the newest member of our family, Dr. Fidelis Ifeanyi Ariguzo, who was born and raised in Cameroon (Africa). Dr. Ariguzo obtained his Doctor of Pharmacy Degree from Manchester University in Indiana.

When ORAL benzodiazepines exceed either the maximum daily dose or dosing frequency for symptoms of anxiety, aggression, and/or agitation, it can cause a paradoxical reaction.

n celebration of International Women’s Day, PDC Rx would like to honor Dame Cicely Saunders, the founder of today’s version of hospice and palliative care for the terminally ill. Dr. Saunders was a London physician who began her work with the terminally ill in 1947. In 1957, she earned her medical degree, and in 1967 she founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in south west London.

Jaymie Wilson knew from a very early age that she wanted to be a health care provider.

Cedar Valley Hospice

At PDC Rx, we genuinely consider it an honor to work with some outstanding hospice organizations. For this month’s Hospice Highlight, we are proud to feature Cedar Valley Hospice in Waterloo, Iowa. Their mission is to enrich lives with knowledge, respect, and compassionate care.

The Holiday season has ended, and the magic is no longer in the air. Many of us may be experiencing a sort of emotional whiplash. As quickly as the Holidays stopped, reality began again. We now face the difficult task of maneuvering through this life while resuming to some normalcy. Evidently, I am not a big fan of normalcy or reality.

n recent years, health care professionals have been reluctant to prescribe methadone as a means of pain management. For many reasons, methadone has sort of a stigma attached to it because it is often used as a treatment for addiction.

Eat healthily. Live healthily. Be healthy. How many times a day are we bombarded by that message? I believe I’ve heard it so often that I’ve become deaf to it. It just seems like rhetoric that’s easily ignored because it makes so much sense. It has become sort of a “duh” kind of message.

We never thought my mother would die... We just never thought about it – never prepared for it or asked her about her end of life requests.

Delirium is defined as an acute state of confusion, characterized by an inability to focus, maintain wakefulness, and/or attention. The presence of delirium leads to an increase in mortality and morbidity, misdiagnoses (particularly for dementia and/or depression), increased length of inpatient stay, and increase in symptom burden – which precipitates an increase in patient’s medication regimen.