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Crohn's disease and colitis are chronic conditions that affect every facet of patients' lives (e.g., social interaction, family, work, diet, and sleep). Thus, treatment consists largely of disease management. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chapter of the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation-IBD Partners-has created an interactive website that, in addition to providing helpful information and disease management tools, provides a discussion forum for patients to talk about their [...]

Electronic health records (EHRs) are rarely shared among medical and dental providers. The purpose of this study was to assess current information sharing and the value of improved electronic information sharing among physicians and dentists in Germany and the United States.

Integration of electronic information is a challenge for multitasking emergency providers, with implications for patient safety. Visual representations can assist sense-making of complex data sets; however, benefit and acceptability in emergency care is unproven.

High-quality clinical notes are essential to effective clinical communication. However, electronic clinical notes are often long, difficult to review, and contain information that is potentially extraneous or out of date. Additionally, many clinicians write electronic clinical notes using customized templates, resulting in notes with significant variability in structure. There is a need to understand better how clinicians review electronic notes and how note structure variability may impact clinicians' note-reviewing experiences.

With the pervasive use of health information technology (HIT) there has been increased concern over the usability and safety of this technology. Identifying HIT usability and safety hazards, mitigating those hazards to prevent patient harm, and using this knowledge to improve future HIT systems are critical to advancing health care.

Clinical decision support (CDS) and computerized provider order entry have been shown to improve health care quality and safety, but may also generate previously unanticipated errors. We identified multiple CDS tools for platelet transfusion orders. In this study, we sought to evaluate and improve the effectiveness of those CDS tools while creating and testing a framework for future evaluation of other CDS tools.

The implementation of health information technology (HIT) is complex. A method for mitigating complexity is incrementalism. Incrementalism forms the foundation of both incremental software development models, like agile, and the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles (PDSAs) of quality improvement (QI), yet we often fail to be incremental at the union of the disciplines. We propose a new model for HIT implementation that explicitly links incremental software development cycles with PDSAs, the QI-HIT Figure [...]

Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) are a good strategy for preventing medication errors and reducing the incidence and severity of adverse drug events (ADEs). However, these systems are not very effective and are subject to multiple limitations that prevent their implementation in clinical practice.

Electronic health record (EHR) downtime is any period during which the EHR system is fully or partially unavailable. These periods are operationally disruptive and pose risks to patients. EHR downtime has not sufficiently been studied in the literature, and most hospitals are not adequately prepared.

Medical students may observe and subsequently perpetuate redundancy in clinical documentation, but the degree of redundancy in student notes and whether there is an association with scholastic performance are unknown.