A mandatory indication-registration tool in hospital electronic medical records enabling systematic evaluation and benchmarking of the quality of antimicrobial use: a feasibility study.

Objectives: Evaluation of the extent and appropriateness of antimicrobial use is a cornerstone of antibiotic stewardship programs, but it is time-consuming. Documentation of the indication at the moment of prescription might be more time-efficient. We investigated the real-life feasibility of mandatory documentation of the indication for all hospital antibiotic prescriptions for quality evaluation purposes.

Pharmacotherapy within a learning healthcare system: rationale for the Dutch Santeon Farmadatabase.

Objectives: The increasing number of available, often expensive, medicines asks for continuous assessment of rational prescribing. We aimed to develop a simple and robust data infrastructure in order to monitor hospital medicine utilisation in real time.

Methods: Within a collaboration (Santeon) of large teaching hospitals in the Netherlands, we set up a process for extraction, transformation, anonymisation and load of individual medicine prescription data and major clinical outcomes from different hospital information systems into a central database.

Clinical Effects of Perioperative Selective Decontamination of the Digestive Tract (SDD) in Cardiac Surgery: A Propensity Score Matched Cohort Analysis.

Objectives: To determine the clinical effects of perioperative endotoxin reduction in the gut lumen in patients undergoing cardiac surgery with cardiopulmonary bypass.

Design: Retrospective cohort analysis with propensity score matching according to treatment group.

Setting: Tertiary center for cardiopulmonary diseases and intensive care medicine.

[Recurrent neutropenia due to adulterated cocaine].

Background: Since 2009, a warning has been issued about cocaine that has been adulterated with levamisole, mainly in the USA and Canada. Agranulocytosis occurs as an idiosyncratic reaction in 3-10% of patients exposed to levamisole.

Case Description: A 36-year-old man was referred to our hospital because of an episode of high fever and infections on his hands, mouth and ears.

Evaluation of the concurrent use of potassium-influencing drugs as risk factors for the development of hyperkalemia.

Background: Hyperkalemia is a potentially dangerous electrolyte abnormality with a reported incidence of 1-10 % in hospitals. Patients are especially at risk of developing this complication if they use a combination of potassium supplements and potassium sparing diuretics or renin-angiotensin-aldosterone-system (RAAS) inhibitors. Previous studies on the occurrence of hyperkalemia in patients who use multiple potassium influencing drugs simultaneously were either small in sample size or did not investigate the full range of drugs involved.