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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 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.

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.

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.

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) has grown since the early 1990s. While many systems serve adult patients, systems for pediatric and neonatal populations have lagged. Adapting adult CPOE systems for pediatric use may require significant modifications to address complexities associated with pediatric care such as daily weight changes and small medication doses.

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.

This study attempts to characterize the inpatient communication network within a quaternary pediatric academic medical center by applying network analysis methods to secure text-messaging data.

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.

In 2013, the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the American Heart Association (AHA) released a revised guideline on statin therapy initiation. The guideline included a 10-year risk calculation based on regression modeling, which made hand calculation infeasible. Compliance to the guideline has been suboptimal, as many patients were recommended but not prescribed statin therapy. Clinical decision support (CDS) tools may improve statin guideline compliance. Few statin guideline CDS tools [...]