Leveraging Electronic Health Record Implementation to Facilitate Clinical and Operational Quality Improvement in an Ambulatory Surgical Clinic.

The implementation of electronic health records is a challenging, complex process requiring significant resources. The temptation is to convert a paper process into electronic format. This strategy fosters a familiar product to the users but is fraught with pitfalls.

Crossing the chasm: information technology to biomedical informatics.

Accelerating the translation of new scientific discoveries to improve human health and disease management is the overall goal of a series of initiatives integrated in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) "Roadmap for Medical Research." The Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program is, arguably, the most visible component of the NIH Roadmap providing resources to institutions to transform their clinical and translational research enterprises along the goals of the Roadmap. The CTSA program emphasizes biomedical informatics as a critical component for the accomplishment of the NIH's translational objectives.

Bridging the care continuum: patient information needs for specialist referrals.

Background: Information transfer is critical in the primary care to specialist referral process and has been examined extensively in the US and other countries, yet there has been little attention to the patient's perspective of the information transfer process. This cross-sectional study examined the quality of the information received by patients with a chronic condition from the referring and specialist physician in the specialist referral process and the relationship of the quality of information received to trust in the physicians.

Methods: Structured telephone interviews were conducted with a random sample of 250 patients who had experienced a referral to a specialist for the first visit for a chronic condition within the prior six months.

Evaluation of reported medication errors before and after implementation of computerized practitioner order entry.

While a major objective of CPOE is to reduce medication errors, its introduction is a major system change that may result in unintended outcomes. Monitoring voluntarily-reported medication errors in a university setting was used to identify the impact of initial CPOE implementation on medical-surgical and intensive care units. A retrospective trend analysis was used to compare errors one year before and six months after implementation.