Sara Jackson, FierceHealthIT
“Two health IT startups aim to help patients sift through the reams of adverse event data collected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to a report today in the Wall Street Journal.
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Ross SE et al, J Med Internet Res, 13(3)
BACKGROUND
Adverse drug events are a major safety issue in ambulatory care. Improving medication self-management could reduce these adverse events. Researchers have developed medication applications for tethered personal health records (PHRs), but little has been reported about medication applications for interoperable PHRs.
OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to develop two complementary personal health applications on a common PHR platform: one to assist children with complex health needs (MyMediHealth), and one to assist older adults in care transitions (Colorado Care Tablet).
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Ken Terry, InformationWeek
“A new AMA report on patient safety in ambulatory care finds that safety problems are widespread but that little is known about which problems cause the most harm. Among the uncertainties cited by the AMA researchers is the contribution of electronic health records (EHRs) to patient safety.
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Ken Terry, InformationWeek
“Hard on the heels of an Institute of Medicine report on regulating the safety of electronic health records (EHRs) and related health IT tools, Ashish K. Jha, MD, and David C. Classen, MD, two of the report’s coauthors, called for patient safety measures to be included in Meaningful Use requirements.
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Singh H et al, Journal of Patient Safety, 2011
Electronic health records (EHRs) have potential quality and safety benefits. However, reports of EHR-related safety hazards are now emerging. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology recently sponsored an Institute of Medicine committee to evaluate how health information technology use affects patient safety. In this article, we propose the creation of a national EHR oversight program to provide dedicated surveillance of EHR-related safety hazards and to promote learning from identified errors, close calls, and adverse events. The program calls for data gathering, investigation/analysis, and regulatory components. The first 2 functions will depend on institution-level EHR safety committees that will investigate all known EHR-related adverse events and near-misses and report them nationally using standardized methods.
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Brian Dunham, CMIO
“Adverse event reporting systems have only negligibly improved healthcare since the 1999 release of the IOM report To Err is Human, wrote the authors of a New England Journal of Medicine perspective published Nov. 10—but, they said, healthcare could be improved by harnessing data and measuring adverse events using EHRs.
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Jha AK, Classen DC. N Engl J Med, 365(19)
More than a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine released its famous report To Err Is Human, which set an ambitious agenda for the United States to reduce the number of Americans who were hurt or killed by medical errors and adverse events.
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Keith W. Boone, Healthcare Standards
“I’m continuing my review of the NIST Technical Evaluation, Testing and Validation of the Usability of Electronic Health Records (NISTIR 7804).
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Sittig DF, Singh H. Archives of Internal Medicine, 171(14)
Despite the promise of health information technology (HIT), recent literature has revealed possible safety hazards associated with its use. The Office of the National Coordinator for HIT recently sponsored an Institute of Medicine committee to synthesize evidence and experience from the field on how HIT affects patient safety. To lay the groundwork for defining, measuring, and analyzing HIT-related safety hazards, we propose that HIT-related error occurs anytime HIT is unavailable for use, malfunctions during use, is used incorrectly by someone, or when HIT interacts with another system component incorrectly, resulting in data being lost or incorrectly entered, displayed, or transmitted.
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Joseph Goedert, HDM Breaking News
“PDR Network has launched a national adverse drug event network to enable physicians to report such events via their electronic health records system, or through a new Web site, RxEvent.org.
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Furukawa MF et al, Medical Care Research and Review, 68(3)
Electronic medical records (EMR) have the potential to improve nursing care in the hospital setting. This study estimated the association of EMR implementation with nurse staffing levels, skill mix, contract/agency percent, and nurse-sensitive patient outcomes in U.S. hospitals. Data on nurse staffing and patient outcomes came from the 2004-2008 National Database of Nursing Quality Indicators. Data on EMR implementation came from the 2004-2008 HIMSS Analytics Database.
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Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“An upcoming Institute of Medicine (IOM) report could set policy wheels in motion that lead to the regulation of electronic health record (EHR) safety, observers believe.
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CMIO
“Coupling an electronic prescription drug ordering system with a computerized method for reporting adverse events can dramatically reduce the number of medication errors in a hospital’s psychiatric unit, according to research published in the March edition of The Journal of Psychiatric Practice.
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Patty Enrado, EHRWatch
“I read an interesting column about an octogenarian woman who lived by herself, despite multiple chronic conditions including congestive heart failure, arthritis, gout and glaucoma.
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Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“There’s little question that electronic health records reduce adverse drug events and improve quality of care. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing everything to make sure they’re as safe and as easy to use as possible, said National Coordinator for HIT, David Blumenthal, MD
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Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“Electronic health records increase physician likelihood of reporting adverse drug events to the FDA, according to a new study by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH).
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Jonathan D. Rockoff, The Wall Street Journal
“Computerized patient records could be used to improve lax reporting of serious drug side effects, the results of a small study suggest.
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Linder JA et al, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety, 2010
Purpose
Physicians in the United States report fewer than 1% of adverse drug events (ADEs) to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but frequently document ADEs within electronic health records (EHRs). We developed and implemented a generalizable, scalable EHR-based system to automatically send electronic ADE reports to the FDA in real-time.
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Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston in collaboration with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed “MedWatcher,” a new iPhone application that provides drug safety surveillance in real-time.
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Margalit Gur-Arie, KevinMD
“Back in the times when EHRs were just EMRs, they had a very simple and humble mission.
The software was supposed to help providers of health care services better manage their business.
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