Priorities Related to Improving Healthcare Safety Through Simulation.

Improving healthcare safety is a worthwhile and important endeavor. Simulation-based activities can help with such a goal through research and training. In this manner, it can focus on education and training, assessment and metrics, process improvement, and culture change to help move forward both patient safety and quality of care.

Usability in Health IT: Beyond Compliance to Meaningful Design and Assessment.

The relatively rapid transition from a paper-based system to a digital system in healthcare has not always employed a sophisticated integration of usability concepts. Yet usability is critical to safety and to effectiveness of the electronic health record, and regulators and policy makers have been increasingly focused on this area. This panel will provide a variety of perspectives on this important issue, ranging from a description of the problem based on current vendor usability practices; recommendations regarding domain content rich usability processes including use cases, assessments, and scenarios; and the extension of usability assessments and design improvements to post-system implementation.

The outcomes of emergency pharmacist participation during acute myocardial infarction.

Background: Current guidelines recommend door-to-balloon times of 90 min or less for patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI).

Objectives: To determine if a clinical pharmacist for the ED (EPh) is associated with decreased door/diagnosis-to-cardiac catheterization laboratory (CCL) time and decreased door-to-balloon time.

Methods: A retrospective observational cohort study of ED patients with STEMI requiring urgent cardiac catheterization was conducted.