Impact of incorporating pharmacy claims data into electronic medication reconciliation.

Purpose: The potential value of adding pharmacy claims data to the medication history in the electronic health record (EHR) to improve the accuracy of medication reconciliation was studied.

Methods: Three medication history sources were used for this evaluation: a gold-standard preadmission medication list (PAML) created by reviewing all available medication history information, an EHR-generated PAML, and pharmacy claims data. The study population consisted of patients from the Partners Medication Reconciliation Study with medication history information available from all three medication history sources.

Criteria for assessing high-priority drug-drug interactions for clinical decision support in electronic health records.

Background: High override rates for drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts in electronic health records (EHRs) result in the potentially dangerous consequence of providers ignoring clinically significant alerts. Lack of uniformity of criteria for determining the severity or validity of these interactions often results in discrepancies in how these are evaluated. The purpose of this study was to identify a set of criteria for assessing DDIs that should be used for the generation of clinical decision support (CDS) alerts in EHRs.

Drug-drug interactions that should be non-interruptive in order to reduce alert fatigue in electronic health records.

Objective: Alert fatigue represents a common problem associated with the use of clinical decision support systems in electronic health records (EHR). This problem is particularly profound with drug-drug interaction (DDI) alerts for which studies have reported override rates of approximately 90%. The objective of this study is to report consensus-based recommendations of an expert panel on DDI that can be safely made non-interruptive to the provider's workflow, in EHR, in an attempt to reduce alert fatigue.