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This study sought to design and validate a reliable instrument to assess the quality of physician documentation.

All methods of identifying medication prescribing errors are fraught with inaccuracies and systematic bias. A systematic, efficient, and inexpensive way of measuring and quantifying prescribing errors would be a useful step for reducing them. We ask if rapid discontinuations of prescription-orders--where physicians stop their orders within 2 hours--would be an expedient proxy for prescribing errors? To study this we analyzed CPOE-system medication orders entered and then discontinued within 2 hours [...]

Shortcomings surrounding the care of patients with diabetes have been attributed largely to a fragmented, disorganized, and duplicative health care system that focuses more on acute conditions and complications than on managing chronic disease. To address these shortcomings, we developed a diabetes registry population management application to change the way our staff manages patients with diabetes. Use of this new application has helped us coordinate the responsibilities for intervening and [...]

The authors develop a typology of clinicians' workarounds when using barcoded medication administration (BCMA) systems. Authors then identify the causes and possible consequences of each workaround. The BCMAs usually consist of handheld devices for scanning machine-readable barcodes on patients and medications. They also interface with electronic medication administration records. Ideally, BCMAs help confirm the five "rights" of medication administration: right patient, drug, dose, route, and time. While BCMAs are reported [...]

This article presents a study identifying benefits and challenges of a novel hospital-to-hospital information technology (IT) outsourcing partnership (HHP). The partnership is an innovative response to the problem that many smaller, rural hospitals face: to modernize their IT infrastructure in spite of a severe shortage of resources. The investigators studied three rural hospitals that outsourced their IT infrastructure, through an HHP, to a larger, more technologically advanced hospital in the [...]

Health care providers have a basic responsibility to protect patients from accidental harm. At the institutional level, creating safe health care organizations necessitates a systematic approach. Effective use of informatics to enhance safety requires the establishment and use of standards for concept definitions and for data exchange, development of acceptable models for knowledge representation, incentives for adoption of electronic health records, support for adverse event detection and reporting, and greater [...]

To develop software infrastructure that will provide support for discovery, characterization, integrated access, and management of diverse and disparate collections of information sources, analysis methods, and applications in biomedical research.

The Biomedical Research Integrated Domain Group (BRIDG) project is a collaborative initiative between the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC), the Regulated Clinical Research Information Management Technical Committee (RCRIM TC) of Health Level 7 (HL7), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop a model of the shared understanding of the semantics of clinical research.

We conducted a prospective observational study to (1) determine usage and construct validity of a method to gauge the cognitive impact of information derived from daily e-mail, and (2) describe self-reported impacts of research-based synopses (InfoPOEMs) delivered as e-mail. Ratings of InfoPOEMs using an Impact assessment scale provided (a) data on usage of the impact assessment method, (b) reports of impact by InfoPOEM and by doctor and (c) data for [...]