Institutional review board barriers and solutions encountered in the Collaboration Among Pharmacists and Physicians to Improve Outcomes Now Study: a national multicenter practice-based implementation trial.

Study Objective: To categorize institutional review board (IRB) challenges and solutions encountered in a multicenter practice-based research network (PBRN) study and to assess the impact of IRB requirements on the willingness of individual principal investigators (PIs) to participate in future PBRN studies.

Design: Descriptive analysis of IRB challenges and solutions encountered in the Collaboration Among Pharmacists and Physicians to Improve Outcomes Now (CAPTION) trial, a multicenter prospective cluster-randomized study conducted by the National Interdisciplinary Primary Care PBRN, and a correlational analysis from a survey of individual site PIs.

Measurements And Main Results: IRB barriers encountered and solutions were categorized for study sites.

Health information technology and physicians' knowledge of drug costs.

Objective: To examine whether physicians' use of information technology (IT) was associated with better knowledge of drug costs.

Study Design/methods: A 2007 statewide survey of 247 primary care physicians in Hawaii regarding IT use and self-reported knowledge of formularies, copayments, and retail prices.

Results: Approximately 8 in 10 physicians regularly used IT in clinical care: 60% Internet, 54% e-prescribing, 43% electronic health records (EHRs), and 37% personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Stratifying medical and pharmaceutical administrative claims as a method to identify pediatric asthma patients in a Medicaid managed care organization.

Claims data are a problematic indicator of underlying clinical diagnosis. They are attractive because of their affordability, a criterion especially salient in resource-shy environments such as the Medicaid Managed Care Organization. This study tested the validity of administrative medical and pharmaceutical claims stratified by treatment modality to identify true pediatric asthma patients.