DRAFT: Policies and Practices to Look for from Organizations that Collect Your Personal Health Information: A Consumer Checklist
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has created a draft checklist of questions consumers should ask before posting their medical information to a data exchange. These questions resulted from AMIA's Secondary Use meetings.

Medical Records Institute’s Ninth Annual Survey of Electronic Medical Records Trends and Usage 2007
The survey shows that, in hospital settings, nurse/staff order entry continues to exceed physician order entry and is increased over 2006. The respondents indicate that, in hospital settings, the level of planned physician order entry with clinical decision support exceeds that planned for physician order entry without clinical decision support. E-prescribing applications to commercial/retail pharmacies reported as most used are: * Drug-drug interactions * Access to drug reference information * Drug allergy checking

Comparison of Administrative-only Versus Administrative Plus Chart Review Data for Reporting HEDIS Hybrid Measures
Performance rates using administrative data alone were substantially lower than rates using combined data (average difference of 20.4 percentage points). On average, more than half of the plans had different quartile rankings based on administrative-only rates versus combined data rates. Measures relying on laboratory claims or laboratory results had the largest discrepancies.

Reasons Provided by Prescribers When Overriding Drug-Drug Interaction Alerts
Of 291,890 overrides identified, 72% were for critical DDIs. Across the Veterans Affairs medical centers, only 20% of the override reasons for critical DDI alerts were rated as clinically useful for order verification. Despite a mandatory override reason for critical DDI alerts, 53% of the responses were “no reason provided.” The top response categories for critical and significant DDI alerts were “no reason provided,” “patient has been taking combination,” and “patient being monitored.”

Is Hospital Patient Care Becoming Safer? A Conversation With Lucian Leape
According to Lucian Leape, patient safety in hospitals is improving, and it is now possible to get to a level of zero defects. Growing recognition of the need for team training, use of trigger tools, improving the competency of physicians, and full disclosure and compensation to injured patients exemplify positive developments. Yet formidable barriers remain, including separatism in how doctors, nurses, and pharmacists learn; inadequate instruction in communication and team-building skills; poorly developed quality and safety curricula; lack of leadership among CEOs and hospital boards; physician apathy; absence of effective systems for accountability; and failure to believe in the possibility of eliminating medical errors and injuries.

The eHealth Initiative released their blueprint representing consensus on an action plan for transforming U.S. healthcare using health IT
The Blueprint represents multi-stakeholder consensus on a shared vision and a set of principles, strategies and actions for improving health and healthcare through information and information technology (IT) in 5 key areas: engaging consumers; transforming care delivery; improving population health; aligning financial and other incentives; and managing privacy, security, and confidentiality.

Patient-Physician E-mail: An Opportunity to Transform Pediatric Health Care Delivery
A total of 306 of 328 families who were offered patient-physician e-mail access enrolled. 121 used the service. The patients sent 40% of their e-mails outside business hours. Messages that were urgent (notification of disease flare, notification of new symptoms, or parent expectation of same-day response) made up 5.7% of the e-mails sent to the physician. Messages that required emergent attention made up 0.002% of the e-mails to the physician. Answering patient questions by e-mail was 57% faster than using the telephone for the physician. The physician received 1.2 e-mails per day from patients. The families who responded to the survey agreed that patient-physician e-mail increased access to the physician and improved the quality of care. The families did not find that patient-physician e-mail distanced them from their child's doctor.

A Survey of U.S.A. Acute Care Hospitals' Computer-based Provider Order Entry System Infusion Levels
We developed and fielded a survey to help clinical information system designers, developers, and implementers better understand the infusion level, or the extent and sophistication of CPOE feature availability and use by clinicians within acute care hospitals across the United States of America. In the 176 responding hospitals, we found that CPOE had been in place a median of 5 years and that the median percentage of orders entered electronically was 90.5%. Greater than 96% of the sites used CPOE to enter pharmacy, laboratory and imaging orders; 82% were able to access all aspects of the clinical information system with a single sign-on; 86% of the respondents had order sets, drug-drug interaction warnings, and pop-up alerts even though nearly all hospitals were community hospitals with commercial systems; and 90% had a CPOE committee with a clinician representative in place.