To improve elderly patients' understanding and safe usage of their medications. English-speaking hospital inpatients aged > or =65 years were recruited. They were self-medicating at home with at least 1 regular medication and had a Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score of at least 20 out of 30. The patients were taught medication details on 3 consecutive days. The patients' medication know...

Adverse Drug Events (ADE) due to medication errors and human factors are a major public health issue. They endanger patient safety and cause considerable extra healthcare costs. The European project PSIP (Patient Safety through Intelligent Procedures in medication) aims to identify and prevent ADE. Data mining of the structured hospital data bases will give a list of observed ADE with frequenci...

BACKGROUND Poor adherence to medication regimens and medical record inconsistencies result in incomplete knowledge of medication therapy in polypharmacy patients. By quantitatively identifying medications in the blood of patients and reconciling detected medications with the medical record, we have defined the severity of this knowledge gap and created a path toward optimizing medication therap...

A physicians prescribing decisions depend on knowledge of the patients medication list. This knowledge is often incomplete, and errors or omissions could result in adverse outcomes. To address this problem, the Joint Commission recommends medication reconciliation for creating a more accurate list of a patients medications. In this paper, we develop techniques for automatic detection of omissio...

BACKGROUND In Western countries, better knowledge about patient-related determinants of treatment adherence (medication and lifestyle) is needed to improve treatment adherence and outcomes among hypertensive ethnic minority patients of African descent. OBJECTIVE To identify patient-related determinants of adherence to lifestyle and medication recommendations among hypertensive African Surinam...

Background and Objectives: Medication error is the most important factor threatening patient safety. While the causes of medication error are extensively researched in the public hospitals, the corresponding data from the private heath settings is limited. To help fill this shortcoming, this paper presents and discusses the results of surveying the medication error factors as perceived by nurse...

Chronic Kidney Disease is a progressive and irreversible loss of renal function. The purpose the study was to understand how patient counselling affects perception, medication adherence identify risk factors non-adherence. A Cross-sectional prospective done among 109 hypertensive patients with for 6 months. All participants were interviewed obtain detailed socio-demographic medical data. Patien...

Background & Aims: Allergic reaction is a common side effect of Efavirenz and drug replacement may not be an option to physicians. Here, a successful drug desensitization experiment on an 8-year-old female child over a period of 9 days is reported. Case presentation: The patient was an 8-year old female child with HIV in Kerman, Iran who had been received oral efavirenz together with lamivudine...