The subspecialty I plan to focus my career on is Medication Therapy Management (MTM), whether I work in a retail environment or not. Pharmaceutical informatics will be important to me, as the programs I use to fill prescriptions will also monitor possible interactions, duplicate therapies, contraindications, etc. of the drugs my patients will receive. This system will be my resource for ascertaining which patients need MTM and why, and by combining the information contained in the patient's medical record at the pharmacy with information I may obtain from the patient's other healthcare providers and from the patient themselves, I will be able to see what points I need to raise during an MTM session. More basic than MTM is counseling, and even more basic is appropriate delivery. The pharmacy's patient information system tracks potential hazards for each patient on every prescription order, and if a safety issue or error occurs in the patient's medication use, the system will notify the pharmacy technician or myself and I intend to pay attention to those warnings and make sure everything is appropriate for each medication order before dispensing it to the patient. By doing this, I hope to avoid any serious medication errors, protect my patients, and ensure that they receive the best possible drug therapy. If I do not use my pharmacy's IT resources correctly, I am responsible for any harm to the patient caused by my negligence. The biggest failure I can think of when it comes to these systems is that they display warning after warning that may or may not be important, then pharmacists or technicians stop paying attention to them and dismiss them without knowing what they are. This practice can be... middle of paper... What is the role of standard/structured medical vocabularies and other standards in CDS? Alternatively, why are standard/structured medical vocabularies needed for CDS? They enable more effective communication between providers, patients and electronic systems. For example, a patient might say they have a broken leg, while a doctor might call it a compound tibial shaft fracture, and the computer system will call it 1000110101101. (That piece of binary code is completely made up.) his assessment of the situation, which the provider would interpret as antibiotics and a rod in the leg. The patient may understand that he or she will need to undergo surgery and receive medications, depending on his or her level of familiarity with medicine. The point is that without a way to translate medical information between different languages, we couldn't cure anything.