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Adoption of health information technology (HIT) is often assessed in surveys of organizations. The validity of data from such surveys for ambulatory clinics has not been evaluated. We compared level of agreement between 1 ambulatory statewide survey and 2 other data sources: a second survey and interviews with survey respondents.

Electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) technology was introduced as an alternative to handwritten prescriptions allowing health care professionals to send prescriptions directly to pharmacies. While the technology has many advantages, such as improving pharmacy workflow and reducing medication errors, some limitations have been realized.

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.

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 [...]

Care plan concordance among patients and clinicians during hospitalization is suboptimal.

Systematic surveillance for venous thromboembolism (VTE) in the United States has been recommended by several organizations. Despite adoption of electronic medical records (EMRs) by most health care providers and facilities, however, systematic surveillance for VTE is not available.

Health care-associated infections, specifically catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), can cause significant mortality and morbidity. However, the process of collecting CAUTI surveillance data, storing it, and visualizing the data to inform health policy has been fraught with challenges.

Discrepancies in controlled substance documentation are common and can lead to legal and regulatory repercussions. We introduced a visual analytics dashboard to assist in a quality improvement project to reduce the discrepancies in controlled substance documentation in the operating room (OR) of our free-standing pediatric hospital.

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 [...]