Dana Farber Cancer Institute

Initiative to examine whether ambulatory care clinicians who used a commercial electronic prescribing system could improve patient safety by preventing adverse drug events among their patients.

Executive Summary: The aims of the project were to assess the incidence of potential prescribing errors, measure the impact of electronic prescribing and clinical decision support on patient safety, and assess the association between acceptance rates and clinical appropriateness and value as assigned by an expert panel. The project successfully accomplished its analytic aims and completed the research and analysis. Specifically, Dana Farber calculated the number of potential adverse drug events that were prevented by a clinician choosing to accept an alert and acceptance rates for each alert type by dividing the number of accepted alerts by the total number of alerted prescriptions. Acceptance rates for all of the different interacting medication classes were also examined. Dana Farber convened a five-member expert clinician panel to judge a variety of characteristics of the most frequently encountered alerts.

Website: http://www.dana-farber.org/