Bridging the gap: leveraging business intelligence tools in support of patient safety and financial effectiveness.

Healthcare is increasingly dependent upon information technology (IT), but the accumulation of data has outpaced our capacity to use it to improve operating efficiency, clinical quality, and financial effectiveness. Moreover, hospitals have lagged in adopting thoughtful analytic approaches that would allow operational leaders and providers to capitalize upon existing data stores. In this manuscript, we propose a fundamental re-evaluation of strategic IT investments in healthcare, with the goal of increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving outcomes through the targeted application of health analytics.

Sharing adverse drug event data using business intelligence technology.

Introduction: Duke University Health System uses computerized adverse drug event surveillance as an integral part of medication safety at 2 community hospitals and an academic medical center. This information must be swiftly communicated to organizational patient safety stakeholders to find opportunities to improve patient care; however, this process is encumbered by highly manual methods of preparing the data.

Description Of Case: Following the examples of other industries, we deployed a business intelligence tool to provide dynamic safety reports on adverse drug events.

Leveraging time and learning style, iPod vs. realtime attendance at a series of medicine residents conferences: a randomised controlled trial.

Objective: To determine whether participation in educational conferences utilising iPod technology enhances both medical knowledge and accessibility to educational content among medical residents in training.

Design/measurements: In May 2007, the authors led a randomised controlled study involving 30 internal medicine residents who volunteered either to attend five midday educational conferences or to use an iPod audio/video recording of the same conferences, each followed by a five-question competency quiz. Primary outcomes included quantitative assessment of knowledge acquisition and qualitative assessment of resident perception of ease of use.