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The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality funded an evidence report to address seven questions on multiple aspects of the effectiveness of medication management information technology (MMIT) and its components (prescribing, order communication, dispensing, administering, and monitoring).

Alerting systems, a type of clinical decision support, are increasingly prevalent in healthcare, yet few studies have concurrently measured the appropriateness of alerts with provider responses to alerts. Recent reports of suboptimal alert system design and implementation highlight the need for better evaluation to inform future designs. The authors present a comprehensive framework for evaluating the clinical appropriateness of synchronous, interruptive medication safety alerts.

Tourism as well as international business travel creates health risks for individuals and populations both in host societies and home countries. One strategy to reduce health-related risks to travelers is to provide travelers and relevant caregivers timely, ongoing access to their own health information. Many websites offer health advice for travelers. For example, the WHO and US Department of State offer up-to-date health information about countries relevant to travel. However [...]

Despite efforts made by ambulatory care organizations to standardize the use of electronic health records (EHRs), practices often incorporate these systems into their work differently from each other. One potential factor contributing to these differences is within-practice communication patterns. The authors explore the linkage between within-practice communication patterns and practice-level EHR use patterns.

To demonstrate the feasibility of capturing the knowledge required to create guideline recommendations in a systematic, structured, manner using a software assistant. Practice guidelines constitute an important modality that can reduce the delivery of inappropriate care and support the introduction of new knowledge into clinical practice. However, many guideline recommendations are vague and underspecified, lack any linkage to supporting evidence or documentation of how they were developed, and prove to [...]

Healthcare debates and policy developments are increasingly concerned with a broad range of values-related areas. These include not only ethical, moral, religious, and other types of values 'proper', but also beliefs, preferences, experiences, choices, satisfaction, quality of life, etc. Research on such issues may be difficult to retrieve. This study used word frequency analysis to generate a broad pool of search terms and a brief filter to facilitate relevant searches [...]

Usability factors are a major obstacle to health information technology (IT) adoption. The purpose of this paper is to review and categorize health IT usability study methods and to provide practical guidance on health IT usability evaluation. 2025 references were initially retrieved from the Medline database from 2003 to 2009 that evaluated health IT used by clinicians. Titles and abstracts were first reviewed for inclusion. Full-text articles were then examined [...]

The Consolidated Standards for Reporting Trials (CONSORT) were published to standardize reporting and improve the quality of clinical trials. The objective of this study is to assess CONSORT adherence in randomized clinical trials (RCT) of disease specific clinical decision support (CDS).

To summarize the Canadian health information technology (HIT) policy experience and impart lessons learned to the US as it determines its policy in this area.

The goal of this paper is to describe the successful application of a use case-based evaluation approach to guide the effective design, evaluation and redesign of inexpensive, commercial, off-the-shelf consumer health informatics (CHI) interventions.