BACKGROUND The importance of creating and sustaining a strong culture of patient safety has been recognized as a critical component of safe medication use. This study aims to assess changes in attitudes toward patient safety culture and frequency of quality-related event (QRE) reporting after guided implementation of a continuous quality improvement (CQI) program in a panel of community pharmac...

Lactic acid production in a batch submerged fermentation process by five Lactobacilli: bulgaricus, casei, lactis, delbrueckii and fermentum in lactose fortified whey culture were investigated. Kinetic behavior of Lactobacilli growth rate and lactose utilization was studied based on the Moser and Gompertz kinetic models. Trendline tool in Excel software was applied for fitness assessment of the ...

As policymakers debate adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare, they must also seek ways to promote cost-effective use of drugs and minimize inappropriate prescribing. For more than a decade, all state Medicaid agencies and most private insurers have used computerized drug utilization review (DUR) programs to prevent or rectify potential prescribing errors. DUR can be retrospective, in w...

BACKGROUND The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 offered the promise that prospective drug utilization review (pDUR) systems would improve the quality of drug prescribing and patient drug use. There is little evidence that this promise has been fulfilled. To the contrary, there is growing evidence that suboptimal use of drugs (in terms of preventable drug-related morbidity) is at least ...

CONTEXT Retrospective drug utilization review is required of all state Medicaid programs and is performed by most private-sector prescription programs. However, it has not been shown to improve clinical outcomes or reduce the rate of potential prescribing errors, known as "exceptions." OBJECTIVE To look for an effect of retrospective drug utilization review on the rate of exceptions and of cl...

Mathematical programming and artificial intelligence (AI) methods are known as the most effective and applicable procedures to form manufacturing cells in designing a cellular manufacturing system (CMS). In this paper, a bi-objective programming model is presented to consider the cell formation problem that is solved by a proposed multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO). The model c...