A rare case is described where an adolescent with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosed in childhood subsequently developed alcohol and drug abuse. He later developed intranasal methylphenidate abuse and dependence after realizing that urine drug screens were expected to be positive for prescribed methylphenidate. This report is to alert physicians to the rare possibility of intran...

BACKGROUND Disseminated mycobacterium avium complex (MAC) occurs mainly in immunocompromised hosts, which is associated with abnormal cellular immunity. CASE PRESENTATION A 26-year-old pregnant woman presented with fever and general weakness. Miliary lung nodules were noted on chest X-ray. Under the impression of miliary tuberculosis, anti-tuberculosis medication was administered. However, th...

Computerized drug prescribing alerts can improve patient safety, but are often overridden because of poor specificity and alert overload. Our objective was to improve clinician acceptance of drug alerts by designing a selective set of drug alerts for the ambulatory care setting and minimizing workflow disruptions by designating only critical to high-severity alerts to be interruptive to clinici...

BACKGROUND Prescription narcotic overdoses and abuse have reached alarming numbers. To address this epidemic, integrated clinical decision support within the electronic medical record (EMR) to impact prescribing behavior was developed and tested. METHODS A multidisciplinary Expert Panel identified risk factors for misuse, abuse, or diversion of opioids or benzodiazepines through literature re...

To my dear family: Thank you for all of your love, support and encouragements. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere and deep gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Wenke Lee, for his great support, guidance, patience and encouragement during the past several years. Wenke has not only guided and helped me on my research work, but also taught me important values of life. He can always di...

Organizations security becomes increasingly more difficult to obtain due to the fact that information technology and networking resources are dispersed across organizations. Network intrusion attacks are more and more difficult to detect even if the most sophisticated security tools are used. To address this problem, researchers and vendors have proposed alert correlation, an analysis process t...

Safety features embedded in electronic Patient Medication Record (ePMR) systems alert users about clinical hazards and errors in prescribed medicines during order entry. To date there has been little research about how these systems, their safety features and alerts are used to support practice; and how they are included in work processes in community pharmacies in England, UK. This study aimed...

EVERY DAY IN hospitals nationwide, patients undergo surgery and receive large amounts of opioids for unrelieved postoperative pain, subsequently experiencing life-threatening opioid-induced respiratory depression. Based on the Joint Commission 2004 to 2011 database of reported opioidrelated sentinel events, 47% of reported events were the result of a wrong dose, 29% from improper monitoring, an...

BACKGROUND Information technology in health care has a clear potential to improve the quality and efficiency of health care, especially in the area of medication processes. On the other hand, existing studies show possible adverse effects on patient safety when IT for medication-related processes is developed, introduced or used inappropriately. OBJECTIVES To summarize definitions and observa...

Non-adherence to prescribed medical treatment is a major health problem especially with chronic diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, Tuberculosis and Malaria for which medication adherence is very critical especially in outpatient setting. This paper presents a voice-based mobile medical alert system (Voice MedAlert) for outpatient adherence. The system runs on client server architecture respon...