Prevention of Pediatric Medication Errors by Hospital Pharmacists and the Potential Benefit of Computerized Physician Order Entry
The purpose of this work was to characterize medication errors and adverse drug events intercepted by a system of pediatric clinical pharmacists and to determine whether the addition of a computerized physician order entry system would improve medication safety. The study included 16938 medication orders for 678 admissions to the pediatric units of a large academic community hospital. Overall, 865 medication errors occurred, corresponding with a rate of 5.2 per 100 medication orders. Overall, 78% of potentially harmful prescribing errors were intercepted; however, none of the potentially harmful errors occurring at administration was intercepted and accounted for 50% of preventable adverse drug events. A computerized physician order entry system could capture additional potentially harmful prescribing and transcription errors (54%–73%) but not administration errors (0% vs 6%).

NHS data are not accurate enough for monitoring doctors’ performance
The research explored the potential use of hospital episode statistics (HES) in England and the patient episode database Wales (PEDW) to support the appraisal and revalidation of consultants. These databases include information such as when a patient is admitted to hospital, their medical condition, which consultant they are allocated to, and when they are discharged. They found discrepancies between the data and what happened in practice. Problems included activity being allocated to the wrong consultants; incorrect lengths of stay for inpatients; and failure to collect and record all the relevant data.

How Web 2.0 is changing medicine
The notion of a medical wikipedia—freely accessible and continually updated by doctors—is worthy of further exploration. Could wikis be used, for example, as a low cost alternative to commercial point of care tools like UpToDate? To a certain extent, this is happening now as the search portal Trip already indexes Ganfyd, one of a handful of medical wikis being developed.

Anti Fraud Requirements for Electronic Health Records
The objective was to study how the use of health information technology (HIT) could enhance and expand fraud management. A multi-stakeholder group of experts worked to identify the best opportunities to strengthen the fraud management capability of a nationwide interoperable HIT infrastructure.

Medical Banking Project to focus on personal health records
The Medical Banking Project recently announced its first test case, which aims to show how the nation’s banks can play a role in solving some of the most vexing issues in healthcare data exchanges. The test case will use open standards in a system that enables providers to determine how much a patient owes for service when those patients are covered by high-deductible health plans. The pilot effort is called the HSA Accumulator Use Case and will be used under the project’s national reference architecture program known as Cooperative Open-source Medical Banking Architecture and Technology, or COMBAT.

PHR certification a focus of AHIC workgroup meeting
The recommendation under review suggested that the Department of Health and Human Services should support CCHIT in developing certification criteria for PHR security, and that the criteria should include specifications for EHR-PHR interoperability.

Review of the Personal Health Record (PHR) Service Provider Market -- Privacy and Security
Altarum developed a scoring tool for examining all privacy policies. While the criteria are not equally important, it is clear that no reviewed privacy policy is even approximately complete, and further, there is wide variation in the scope and breadth of the reviewed policies. On page 14 of this report, they put forth a straw man describing PHR privacy policies to further this conversation.