PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Electronic medication alerts designed with provider in mind reduce prescribing errors

Electronic medication alerts designed with provider in mind reduce prescribing errors
2014-03-25
(Press-News.org) INDIANAPOLIS -- Changing how medication alerts are presented in electronic medical records resulted in safer prescribing, increased efficiency and reduced workload for health care providers who placed drug orders in a study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

"The VA electronic medical record system is one of the most widely used and respected EMR systems in the country," said Alissa L. Russ, Ph.D., a human factors engineer who led the study. "This EMR is used by providers at over 150 VA hospitals. We are looking at ways to improve the alert system for these providers and for patient care." Dr. Russ is a Richard Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center research scientist, a Regenstrief Institute investigator and an adjunct assistant professor with the Purdue College of Pharmacy.

In this simulation study, investigators used knowledge from other industries and applications, such as the design of road signs and medication warning labels, to redesign medication alerts, such as drug allergy and drug-drug interaction warnings. Several changes were incorporated, including the use of concise language and a table-like format to help providers scan for information quickly.

Some of the redesigned alerts also presented more detail, such as a patient's previous symptoms and lab results, so providers did not have to search for this information elsewhere in the patient's electronic medical record. In addition to adopting safer prescribing practices, doctors, nurse practitioners and clinical pharmacists reported higher satisfaction with the redesigned display and the quality of the information presented.

These types of design changes can help providers pay attention to alerts and may reduce some aspects of alert fatigue, according to Dr. Russ.

The investigators used methods developed in human factors engineering to study the alerts and found that prescribers who participated in the simulation sometimes inadvertently canceled a medication when they thought they were ordering it -- or, vice versa, unintentionally ordered a drug, depending on the alert design. These findings have not previously been reported for medication alerts. All patients in the study were fictitious, allowing researchers to safely test the design changes.

The study authors noted that good alert design may offer better cognitive support during busy patient encounters and may help providers extract information quickly, while a poor design may cause prescribers to prematurely dismiss alerts. They also found that repeating alerts in the same ordering session for a given patient did not substantially reduce prescribing errors.

"Serious gaps remain in understanding how to effectively display medication alert information to prescribers. In our study, prescribing errors significantly declined with the redesign, but the number of these errors remains too high. So our next step, which we have already begun, is to learn more about the decision-making process that providers go through when they encounter medication alerts," Dr. Russ said. "An improved understanding of this process will enable us to design even better alerts, with the end goal of enhancing patient safety."

INFORMATION: In addition to Dr. Russ, authors of "Applying human factors principles to alert design increases efficiency and reduces prescribing errors in a scenario-based simulation" are Regenstrief Institute and VA investigators Alan J. Zillich, Pharm.D., and Michael Weiner, M.D., MPH; Brittany L. Melton, Pharm.D., Ph.D., University of Kansas; Scott A. Russell, BSE, M.S., and Siying Chen, Pharm.D., of the VA; Jeffrey R. Spina, M.D., of the VA and UCLA: Elizabette G. Johnson, B.A., Purdue University; Joanne K. Daggy, Ph.D., of the VA and Indiana University School of Medicine; Sue McManus, Ph.D., N.P., Jason M. Hawsey, B.S., and Anthony G. Puleo, B.S., all of the VA; Bradley N. Doebbeling, M.D., M.Sc., IU School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Regenstrief Institute and VA; and Jason J. Saleem, Ph.D., of the VA. Dr. Zillich is a Purdue College of Pharmacy faculty member, and Dr. Weiner is on the faculty of the IU School of Medicine.

This work was supported by VA Health Services Research and Development grant PPO 09-298 and VA HSR&D award CDA 11-214 and was conducted in the VA HSR&D Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation Laboratory in Indianapolis. Views expressed in the JAMIA article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the U.S. government.

[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Electronic medication alerts designed with provider in mind reduce prescribing errors

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Pesticides make the life of earthworms miserable

Pesticides make the life of earthworms miserable
2014-03-25
Pesticides have a direct impact on the physiology and behaviour of earthworms, a Danish/French research team reports after having studied earthworms that were exposed to pesticides over generations. "We see that the worms have developed methods to detoxify themselves, so that they can live in soil sprayed with fungicide. They spend a lot of energy on detoxifying, and that comes with a cost: The worms do not reach the same size as other worms, and we see that there are fewer of them in sprayed soil. An explanation could be that they are less successful at reproducing, ...

RI Hospital: Number of patients admitted with antibiotic-resistant infections is rising

2014-03-25
PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The emergence of community-acquired infections, such as urinary tract infections (UTI), due to strains resistant to common antibiotics are on the rise, according to Rhode Island Hospital researchers. The study is published online in the journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control. "Over the last several years, we've seen an increase in the number of bacteria -- many of which are forms of E. coli -- that are resistant to commonly administered antibiotics," said Leonard Mermel, D.O., medical director of the department of epidemiology and infection ...

Twenty-five percent of breast cancer survivors report financial decline due to treatment

Twenty-five percent of breast cancer survivors report financial decline due to treatment
2014-03-25
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Four years after being treated for breast cancer, a quarter of survivors say they are worse off financially, at least partly because of their treatment, according to a new study led by University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers. In addition, 12 percent reported that they still have medical debt from their treatment. Financial decline varied significantly by race, with Spanish-speaking Latinas most likely to be impacted. Debt was reported more frequently in English-speaking Latinas and Blacks, the study found. Results appear in ...

Blood test may help predict whether a child will become obese

2014-03-25
Scientists have found that a simple blood test, which can read DNA, could be used to predict obesity levels in children. Researchers at the Universities of Southampton, Exeter and Plymouth used the test to assess the levels of epigenetic switches in the PGC1a gene – a gene that regulates fat storage in the body. Epigenetic switches take place through a chemical change called DNA methylation which controls how genes work and is set during early life. The Southampton team found that the test, when carried out on children at five years old, differentiates between children ...

Kids' books featuring animals with human traits lead to less learning of the natural world

2014-03-25
TORONTO, ON – A new study by University of Toronto researchers has found that kids' books featuring animals with human characteristics not only lead to less factual learning but also influence children's reasoning about animals. Researchers also found that young readers are more likely to attribute human behaviors and emotions to animals when exposed to books with anthropomorphized animals than books depicting animals realistically. "Books that portray animals realistically lead to more learning and more accurate biological understanding," says lead author Patricia ...

MRI reveals genetic activity

MRI reveals genetic activity
2014-03-25
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Doctors commonly use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to diagnose tumors, damage from stroke, and many other medical conditions. Neuroscientists also rely on it as a research tool for identifying parts of the brain that carry out different cognitive functions. Now, a team of biological engineers at MIT is trying to adapt MRI to a much smaller scale, allowing researchers to visualize gene activity inside the brains of living animals. Tracking these genes with MRI would enable scientists to learn more about how the genes control processes such as forming ...

Coerced sex not uncommon for young men, teenage boys, study finds

2014-03-25
WASHINGTON - A large proportion of teenage boys and college men report having been coerced into sex or sexual behavior, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. A total of 43 percent of high school boys and young college men reported they had an unwanted sexual experience and of those, 95 percent said a female acquaintance was the aggressor, according to a study published online in the APA journal Psychology of Men and Masculinity. "Sexual victimization continues to be a pervasive problem in the United States, but the victimization ...

Long-term productivity higher in university spin-offs than in other companies

2014-03-25
The study, published in the journal Technovation and written by Pere Ortín Ángel and Ferran Vendrell Herrero, covers financial data from two comparison samples of companies founded between 1994 and 2005. One sample is made up of 104 university spin-offs and the other is made up of 73 technology-based, non-university companies. The study compares what is known as the total factor productivity of these two samples. According to the study, in the university spin-offs this productivity is, on average, lower in the year in which the company is founded. Nevertheless, data shows ...

Autophagy in the initial stage is unrelated to the composition of beclin 1 complex

Autophagy in the initial stage is unrelated to the composition of beclin 1 complex
2014-03-25
Alteration of the autophagic process is involved in neurodegeneration. The beclin 1 complex is shown to play a key role in the initial stage of autophagy. Dr. Yanming Wei and co-coworkers from College of Life Science, Northwest Agriculture & Forestry University in China pointed out the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-linked Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase 1 G93A mutant can upregulate autophagic activity in NSC34 cells, but that this does not markedly affect beclin 1 complex components. The relevant paper has been published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 1, 2014). INFORMATION: Article: ...

Lipid rafts participate in the renewal of brain neurons in Alzheimer's disease

2014-03-25
Research over decades has implicated aberrant autophagy and lysosomal function as reliable markers and therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases. Lipid rafts are shown to participate in lysosomal reproduction, and some lysosomal storage diseases are proposed to result from the accumulation of lipids in late endosomal/lysosomal compartments. Prof. Lin Yuan and team from Southern Medical University in China review the influence of lipid rafts on the progression of Alzheimer's disease through the modulation of aberrant autophagic-lysosomal pathway of amyloid-ß peptide, ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

CMD-OPT model enables the discovery of a potent and selective RIPK2 inhibitor as preclinical candidate for the treatment of acute liver injury

Melatonin receptor 1a alleviates sleep fragmentation-aggravated testicular injury in T2DM by suppression of TAB1/TAK1 complex through FGFR1

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals Shen-Bai-Jie-Du decoction retards colorectal tumorigenesis by regulating the TMEM131–TNF signaling pathway-mediated differentiation of immunosuppressive dendritic ce

Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B Volume 15, Issue 7 Publishes

New research expands laser technology

Targeted radiation offers promise in patients with metastasized small cell lung cancer to the brain

A high clinically translatable strategy to anti-aging using hyaluronic acid and silk fibroin co-crosslinked hydrogels as dermal regenerative fillers

Mount Sinai researchers uncover differences in how males and females change their mind when reflecting on past mistakes

CTE and normal aging are difficult to distinguish, new study finds

Molecular arms race: How the genome defends itself against internal enemies

Tiny chip speeds up antibody mapping for faster vaccine design

KTU experts reveal why cultural heritage is important for community unity

More misfolded proteins than previously known may contribute to Alzheimer’s and dementia

“Too much going on”: Autistic adults overwhelmed by non-verbal social cues

What’s driving America’s deep freezes in a warming world?

A key role of brain protein in learning and memory is deciphered by scientists

Heart attacks don’t follow a Hollywood script

Erin M. Schuman wins 2026 Nakasone Award for discovery on neural synapse function and change during formation of memories

Global ocean analysis could replace costly in-situ sound speed profiles in seafloor positioning, study finds

Power in numbers: Small group professional coaching reduces rates of physician burnout by nearly 30%

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage: A comprehensive review of CCUS-EOR

New high-temperature stable dispersed particle gel for enhanced profile control in CCUS applications

State gun laws and firearm-related homicides and suicides

Use of tobacco and cannabis following state-level cannabis legalization

Long-term obesity and biological aging in young adults

Eindhoven University of Technology and JMIR Publications announce unlimited open access publishing agreement

Orphan nuclear receptors in metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease development

A technological breakthrough for ultra-fast and greener AI

Pusan National University researchers identify key barriers hindering data-driven smart manufacturing adoption

Inking heterometallic nanosheets: A scalable breakthrough for coating, electronics, and electrocatalyst applications

[Press-News.org] Electronic medication alerts designed with provider in mind reduce prescribing errors