Failure of automated telephone outreach with speech recognition to improve colorectal cancer screening: a randomized controlled trial.

Background: Automated telephone outreach with speech recognition (ATO-SR) is used extensively by health plans. Whether ATO-SR can increase rates of colorectal cancer (CRC) screening is unknown.

Methods: We randomly allocated 40 000 health plan members to ATO-SR and 40 000 to usual care, of whom 10 432 and 10 506 in the intervention and usual care groups, respectively, had not been previously screened and were therefore eligible for analysis.

Medication reconciliation: Harvard Pilgrim Health Care's approach to improving outpatient medication safety.

Hospitals and long-term care facilities have been addressing the issue of patient safety for some time. As a result of the increasing number of outpatient medication errors leading to adverse drug events (ADEs), interest in preventing outpatient medication errors has increased. Research indicates that the rate of outpatient ADEs may be about four times as high as that reported in hospital studies and that more than one third of these events are preventable (Gandhi et al.