Drug Alert Experience and Salience during Medical Residency at Two Healthcare Institutions.

Background: Drug alerts are clinical decision support tools intended to prevent medication misadministration. In teaching hospitals, residents encounter the majority of the drug alerts while learning under variable workloads and responsibilities that may have an impact on drug-alert response rates.

Objectives: This study was aimed to explore drug-alert experience and salience among postgraduate year 1 (PGY-1), postgraduate year 2 (PGY-2), and postgraduate year 3 (PGY-3) internal medicine resident physicians at two different institutions.

Differences, Opportunities, and Strategies in Drug Alert Optimization-Experiences of Two Different Integrated Health Care Systems.

Background: Concerns about the number of automated medication alerts issued within the electronic health record (EHR), and the subsequent potential for alarm fatigue, led us to examine strategies and methods to optimize the configuration of our drug alerts.

Objectives: This article reports on comprehensive drug alerting rates and develops strategies across two different health care systems to reduce the number of drug alerts.

Methods: Standardized reports compared drug alert rates between the two systems, among 13 categories of drug alerts.

Notes from the field: a case of hepatic failure and reflections on current status of healthcare of Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

Recent trends and research suggest health conditions of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon are deteriorating. The following case study highlights some of the problems that refugees encounter seeking health care services in Lebanon. A coordinated response from Non-governmental organization (NGO) with intense focus on non-communicable disease (NCD) is needed to avert further worsening of health conditions on the ground.

Optimizing drug-dose alerts using commercial software throughout an integrated health care system.

All default electronic health record and drug reference database vendor drug-dose alerting recommendations (single dose, daily dose, dose frequency, and dose duration) were silently turned on in inpatient, outpatient, and emergency department areas for pediatric-only and nonpediatric-only populations. Drug-dose alerts were evaluated during a 3-month period. Drug-dose alerts fired on 12% of orders (104 098/834 911).

Metastatic colorectal cancer to the small bowel-an uncommon cause of obscure GI bleeding: a three-case experience with review of the literature.

Purpose: Metastatic colorectal cancer to the small intestine is a rare condition presenting with nonspecific symptoms such as obscure gastrointestinal bleeding (OGIB). We report our experience with the use of capsule endoscopy (CE) and double-balloon enteroscopy (DBE) to identify and diagnose the metastatic colorectal cancer to the small bowel. The aim was to demonstrate the approach to the diagnosis of metastatic colorectal cancer to the small bowel including literature review.

Aluminium content of some foods and food products in the USA, with aluminium food additives.

The primary objective was to determine the aluminium (Al) content of selected foods and food products in the USA which contain Al as an approved food additive. Intake of Al from the labeled serving size of each food product was calculated. The samples were acid or base digested and analysed for Al using electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry.