Patient administration systems

Patient-tailored acetylcysteine administration.

Acetylcysteine is a familiar friend of emergency physicians, intensivists, and medical toxicologists. There are 2 broad categories of acetaminophen toxicity that receive acetylcysteine therapy: acute single overdose ingestion and repeated supratherapeutic (“chronic”) ingestion. Since the 1970s, we have used acetylcysteine to reduce liver injury and death in patients with an acute overdose inges...

Systems Administration

Is Patient Choice the Future of Health Care Systems?

Patient and user choice are at the forefront of the debate on the future direction of health and public services provision in many industrialized countries in Europe and elsewhere. It is used both, as a means to achieve desired policy goals in public health care systems such as greater efficiency and improved quality of care, and as a good with its own intrinsic value. However, the evidence sug...

Decreasing patient misidentification before chemotherapy administration.

More accurate patient identification is a Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal. To decrease the possibility of patient misidentification during chemotherapy administration, nurses on the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill instituted a bedside check and measured compliance.

Technology Evaluation: Workarounds to Barcode Medication Administration Systems: Their Occurrences, Causes, and Threats to Patient Safety

The authors develop a typology of clinicians' workarounds when using barcoded medication administration (BCMA) systems. Authors then identify the causes and possible consequences of each workaround. The BCMAs usually consist of handheld devices for scanning machine-readable barcodes on patients and medications. They also interface with electronic medication administration records. Ideally, BCMA...