Chemotherapy drugs are characterized by low therapeutic indices and significant toxicities at clinically prescribed doses, raising serious issues of drug safety. The safety of the chemotherapy medication use process is further challenged by regimen complexity and need to tailor treatment to patient status. Errors that occur during chemotherapy prescribing are associated with serious and life-th...

The American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) believes that pharmacists who practice in hospitals and health systems (“health-system pharmacists”) have a critical leadership role in national health care quality-improvement initiatives. Health-system pharmacists possess the knowledge of drug therapy and medication-use systems required to successfully implement quality-assurance and im...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of interruptions and task complexity on error rates when prescribing with computerized provider order entry (CPOE) systems, and to categorize the types of prescribing errors. DESIGN Two within-subject factors: task complexity (complex vs simple) and interruption (interruption vs no interruption). Thirty-two hospital doctors used a CPOE system in a computer labo...

A "Medication Profile," the information about the medicines a person is using and has used, is a core part of many electronic health record systems and summaries. However, there is little objective research into the data elements that the profile should contain to support the uses it must serve. With the increasing emphasis on secondary uses of electronic health information, as well as supporti...

Health information technology (HIT) is generally accepted as the solution for the nation's medical error crisis. Although limited studies suggest the importance of using HIT in the process of medication management, research has failed to adequately describe how HIT actually works in capturing medication error data and improving patient safety within a healthcare system.1-3 The aim of our study ...

BACKGROUND Adequate record keeping of medication adverse events in electronic health records systems is important for patient safety. Events that remain unrecorded cannot be communicated from one health professional to another. In the absence of a gold standard, we investigate the variation between Dutch general practices in the extent to which they record medication adverse events. METHODS D...

BACKGROUND Patients with diabetes often have poor adherence to using medications as prescribed. The reasons why, however, are not well understood. Furthermore, most health care delivery processes do not routinely assess medication adherence or the factors that contribute to poor adherence. OBJECTIVE The objective of the study was to assess the feasibility of an integrated informatics approach...

Activity recognition approaches have been applied in home ambient systems to monitor the status and wellbeing of occupant especially for home care systems. With the advancement of embedded wireless sensing devices, various applications have been proposed to monitor userâĂŹs activities and maintain a healthy lifestyle. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a Smart Medication Alert and Treatment...