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Medication errors are common, and while most such errors have little potential for harm they cause substantial extra work in hospitals. A small proportion do have the potential to cause injury, and some cause preventable adverse drug events.

All articles indexed in MEDLINE or CINAHL, related to the use of computer technology in patient education, and published in peer-reviewed journals between 1971 and 1998 were selected for review. Sixty-six articles, including 21 research-based reports, were identified. Forty-five percent of the studies were related to the management of chronic disease. Thirteen studies described an improvement in knowledge scores or clinical outcomes when computer-based patient education was compared with traditional [...]

The Hanshin-Awaji earthquake in January 1995 caused the greatest number of deaths and injuries in Japan since World War II. Various weaknesses of modern information systems were exposed during and after the earthquake. The authors carried out a questionnaire survey to investigate the current state of hospital information and to examine the kinds of information needed immediately after an earthquake. The survey results show that information about the ability to [...]

Many hospitals are investing in computer-based provider order-entry (POE) systems, and providers' evaluations have proved important for the success of the systems. The authors assessed how physicians and nurses viewed the effects of one modified commercial POE system on time spent patients, resource utilization, errors with orders, and overall quality of care.

Clinical laboratories and clinicians transmit certain laboratory test results to public health agencies as required by state or local law. Most of these surveillance data are currently received by conventional mail or facsimile transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, and Association of Public Health Laboratories are preparing to implement surveillance systems that will use existing laboratory information systems to transmit electronic [...]

Finding documents on the World Wide Web relevant to a specific medical information need can be difficult. The goal of this work is to define a set of document content description tags, or metadata encodings, that can be used to promote disciplined search access to Internet medical documents.

Two of the greatest obstacles to the implementation of the standardized electronic medical record are physician and staff acceptance and the development of a complete standardized medical vocabulary. Physicians have found the familiar desktop computer environment cumbersome in the examination room and the coding and hierarchic structure of existing vocabulary inadequate. The author recommends the use of digital ink, the graphic form of the pen computer, in telephone messaging and [...]

To evaluate the influence of computer-based reminders about influenza vaccination on the behavior of individual clinicians at each clinical opportunity.

Clinical practice guidelines must be implemented effectively if they are to influence the behavior of clinicians. The authors describe a model for computer-based guideline implementation that identifies eight information management services needed to integrate guideline-based decision support with clinical workflow. Recommendation services determine appropriate activities in specific clinical circumstances. Documentation services involve data capture. Registration services integrate demographic and administrative data. Explanation services enhance the credibility of automated recommendations by [...]