Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Studying HIT and Medication Use

Brigham and Women’s Hospital with grant support from AHRQ is conducting a research study on how HIT can be used to improve the safety and quality of prescribing while reducing costs. The study is examining how to do effective post marketing surveillance, how to use decision support to improve therapeutics in chronic disease management, how to ensure that HIT interventions cause a minimal number of new errors, how to smooth transitions for patients, how clinical data exchange needs to work, and what decision support should be implemented.

Six projects are being undertaken to evaluate:

· The effectiveness of using the telephone to ask outpatients whether they are experiencing specific adverse effects related to prescribed medications
· The impact of clinical decision support and automated telephone outreach on antihypertensive and lipid lowering therapy in ambulatory care
· Any new errors created when electronic prescribing is implemented
· The impact of a post discharge ambulatory medication intervention
· The 6 Regional Health Information Organizations in New York and their experience with medication safety
· Develop AMIA’s ONCHIT sponsored Clinical Decision Support Roadmap complete with a set of clinical decision support rules to be used in multiple settings.