A Pharmacy Blueprint for Electronic Medical Record Implementation Success.

Objective: Implementation of an integrated, electronic medical record (EMR) has been promoted as a means of improving patient safety and quality. While there are a few reports of such processes that incorporate computerized prescriber order entry, pharmacy verification, an electronic medication administration record (eMAR), point-of-care barcode scanning, and clinical decision support, there are no published reports on how a pharmacy department can best participate in implementing such a process across a multihospital health care system.

Method: This article relates the experience of the design, build, deployment, and maintenance of an integrated EMR solution from the pharmacy perspective.

Educational interventions to reduce use of unsafe abbreviations.

Purpose: Educational interventions to reduce the use of abbreviations and dosage designations that were deemed unsafe at a level 1 trauma center are described.

Summary: Strategies to reduce the use of unsafe abbreviations at Detroit Receiving Hospital were studied. Six abbreviations and dosage designations were deemed as unsafe by the site's medication-use and patient medical safety committees: (1) U for units, (2) microg for microgram, (3) TIW for three times a week, (4) the degree symbol for hour, (5) trailing zeros after a decimal point, and (6) the lack of leading zeros before a decimal point.