Center of Excellence for Patient Safety Research and Practice
David Bates, MD, is prominently featured in an important new episode of the Public Television Series Highlighting Electronic Health Records and Patient Safety in Examination of U.S. Health Care Healthy Body, Healthy Mind - Electronic Health Records & Patient Safety.
Our Newest Patient Safety Training Tool Now Available Online:
Center of Excellence
for Patient Safety Research and Practice
Terminology Training Manual. Bates DW, Kaushal R, Keohane C, Cook EF.
This Center of Excellence's theme is to improve drug safety across the continuum of care and patient groups. We are performing studies involving inpatients, outpatients and nursing home patients. These study participants include adult, pediatric, psychiatric and the frail elderly. The study Investigators have a significant track record in patient safety initiatives and their collaboration in this Center of Excellence will play a major role in defining current levels of medication safety and how medication safety can be improved.
Much of the information available to date comes from studies involving adult inpatients and it is critical to broaden this spectrum. While a few interventions - for example computerized medication ordering in adult inpatients - have been demonstrated to be effacious in this particular setting, the effect in other settings and patient populations has not been fully evaluated. It appears likely that other interventions will be needed in other domains.
There are 6 projects, with one or two addressing each of the domains. Thus we will build on our prior experience by:
1.) expanding current knowledge of epidemiology in two areas, pediatrics and psychiatry;
2.) augmenting error reporting and learning from error, moving from local system-wide error reporting, while covering a full domain of error;
3.) evaluating innovations including: a novel system designed to reduce the frequency of intravenous errors; an intervention for improving the use of warfarin in nursing homes; developing and validating tools to rapidly assess the culture of an institution and its attitude regarding error.
