STUDY OBJECTIVE The variable effectiveness of clinical asthma pathways to reduce hospital admissions may be explained in part by the timing of systemic corticosteroid administration. We examine the effect of early (within 60 minutes [SD 15 minutes] of triage) versus delayed (>75 minutes) administration of systemic corticosteroids on health outcomes. METHODS We conducted a prospective observat...

OBJECTIVE To outline methods for deriving and validating intensive care unit (ICU) antimicrobial utilization (AU) measures from computerized data and to describe programming problems that emerged. DESIGN Retrospective evaluation of computerized pharmacy and administrative data. SETTING ICUs from 4 academic medical centers over 36 months. INTERVENTIONS Investigators separately developed an...