Reductions in 30-day readmission, mortality, and costs with inpatient-to-community pharmacist follow-up.

Objectives: To determine the impact of pharmacist-provided continuous care and electronic communication on readmissions among a group of high-risk patients.

Design: Pragmatic interventional study with 5:1 matched control.

Setting And Participants: Patients discharged from any of 4 hospitals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, pneumonia, heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, or diabetes within Pennsylvania.

Utilizing big data to provide better health at lower cost.

Purpose: The efficient use of big data in order to provide better health at a lower cost is described.

Summary: As data become more usable and accessible in healthcare, organizations need to be prepared to use this information to positively impact patient care. In order to be successful, organizations need teams with expertise in informatics and data management that can build new infrastructure and restructure existing infrastructure to support quality and process improvements in real time, such as creating discrete data fields that can be easily retrieved and used to analyze and monitor care delivery.

Impact of electronic order management on the timeliness of antibiotic administration in critical care patients.

Objective: To examine the effect of implementing electronic order management on the timely administration of antibiotics to critical-care patients.

Methods: We used a prospective pre-post design, collecting data on first-dose IV antibiotic orders before and after the implementation of an integrated electronic medication-management system, which included computerized provider order entry (CPOE), pharmacy order processing and an electronic medication administration record (eMAR). The research was performed in a 24-bed adult medical/surgical ICU in a large, rural, tertiary medical center.