This usability study examined whether older adults could use a mobile application to consider the risks and benefits of anticholinergics, a high-risk medication class. The 23 participants reported an overall high usability for the application, suggesting that mobile health information technology has potential to engage patients in safety.

This randomized controlled trial found that tailoring drug–drug interaction alerts with relevant laboratory data did not improve physicians' adherence to treatment recommendations, even for patients at high risk of a clinically significant interaction.

… Journal of patient safety … J Patient Saf … Adverse events after hospital discharge are a …

This study found that adding decision support to an existing computerized provider order entry system reduced the frequency of excessively dosed prescriptions by emergency physicians from 74% to 43%.

Elderly patients are particularly vulnerable to adverse drug events. This randomized trial used a decision support system coupled with computerized provider order entry to target prescribing of potentially inappropriate medications to elderly patients in an urban emergency department. Physicians who received alerts warning them of a drug's potential adverse effects were significantly less likely to prescribe potentially harmful medications. Although prior studies of computerized reminders have found that physicians frequently ignore reminders, in this study decision support alerts were accepted nearly half the time, and alerts were generally rejected for valid reasons (for example, the patient had tolerated the medication previously). The challenges of implementing effective medication decision support systems are discussed in an AHRQ WebM&M perspective.

… of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA … J Am Med Inform Assoc … Structured reminders within an …