Q. Is it true that next year I won’t be able to use my flexible spending account to pay for over-the-counter drugs unless I get a doctor’s prescription?

A. That’s right. Even though you don’t need a prescription for over-the-counter medications like Claritin or ibuprofen, if you want to pay for them with money from a flexible spending account (FSA), next year you will need.

Biomedical Informatics is an emerging discipline that has been defined as the study, invention, and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information. The end objective of biomedical informatics is the coalescing of data, knowledge, and the tools necessary to apply that data and knowledge in the decision-making process, at the time and place that a decision needs to be made.