Rapid identification of myocardial infarction risk associated with diabetes medications using electronic medical records.

OBJECTIVE To assess the ability to identify potential association(s) of diabetes medications with myocardial infarction using usual care clinical data obtained from the electronic medical record. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We defined a retrospective cohort of patients (n = 34,253) treated with a sulfonylurea, metformin, rosiglitazone, or pioglitazone in a single academic health care network. All patients were aged >18 years with at least one prescription for one of the medications between 1 January 2000 and 31 December 2006.

Knowledge management and content integration: a collaborative approach.

Knowledge Management (KM) is the development and maintenance of decision support knowledge within clinical healthcare systems. At Partners Healthcare System (PHS), Knowledge Management is facilitated by a dedicated team consisting of Subject Matter Experts (SME), Knowledge Engineers (KE), and software developers. This group relies upon sound knowledge management principles to support the knowledge lifecycle.

STROBE-based methodology for detection of adverse events across multiple communities.

Partners Healthcare is one of five institutions in conjunction with eHealth Initiative (eHI) and the FDA that is collaborating in a nation-wide effort to develop novel health information technology tools to create an active drug safety surveillance system across the U.S. The STROBE statement serves as the standard for the definition of a structured, systematic, reproducible approach for detecting both the risks and benefits of drug treatments in multiple settings.

Design and implementation of a clinical rule editor for chronic disease reminders in an electronic medical record.

Clinical reminders have well-documented benefits in improving quality of care. Once clinicians approve evidence-based rules, they should be quickly implemented. However, most of the reminders in our home-grown EMR historically were hard-coded, making it difficult to maintain old rules and implement new ones.