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.
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.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
SINGLE
Enrollment
701
The intervention in this study is the presentation of medication safety alerts in the electronic medical record to improve patient outcomes and safety.
Regenstrief/Indiana University
Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Preventable Adverse drug events
Data were electronically collected each time a physician entered a prescription that triggered an alert related to medication safety.
Time frame: 8/5/2004 - 1/5/2005
Total adverse drug events, medication errors
Time frame: 1/15/2001 - 5/15/2001
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