Impact of Electronic Prescribing on Medication Safety
Conditions
Brief summary
Patient safety is at the forefront of critical issues in health care. Medications are the single most frequent cause of adverse events, and in the inpatient setting adverse drug events (ADEs) are common, expensive, injurious to patients, and often preventable. Relatively little, however, is known about the frequency of ADEs in the ambulatory setting, how to monitor for outpatient ADEs, or on the impact of prevention strategies such as computerization of prescribing supplemented by decision-support.
Detailed description
Specific Aim 1: Increase routine identification of outpatient adverse drug events (ADEs) through development of a computerized ADE detection monitor. Specific Aim 2: Use basic computerized outpatient prescribing to reduce preventable ADEs in a diverse array of outpatient settings. Specific Aim 3: Use advanced decision-support within computerized prescribing to reduce the frequency of preventable ADEs, medication errors, and potential ADEs.
Interventions
OTHERAdverse Drug Event Monitoring
The intervention in this study is the presentation of medication safety alerts in the electronic medical record to improve patient outcomes and safety.
Sponsors
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
Study design
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE (Caregiver)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
At Brigham & Women's Hospital, clinics utilizing the electronic medical record will be included. At Regenstrief, any clinic that has access to their electronic medical record will be utilized. * For the impact of basic decision support, clinics were not randomized * For impact of advanced decision support, clinics were randomized to receive the intervention
Exclusion criteria
* Clinics not using electronic medical records
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Preventable Adverse drug events | 8/5/2004 - 1/5/2005 | Data were electronically collected each time a physician entered a prescription that triggered an alert related to medication safety. |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame |
|---|---|
| Total adverse drug events, medication errors | 1/15/2001 - 5/15/2001 |
Countries
United States
Outcome results
None listed