Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) eliminates illegible handwriting, reduces medical errors, and improves patient care. The administration, medical staff, nursing, and health information systems departments of a community teaching hospital cooperated to achieve organization-wide use of its CPOE system.

Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) is touted as a major improvement in patient safety, primarily as a result of the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report on medical errors and the subsequent formation of the "Leapfrog Group" of companies to preferentially direct their employees' health care to those institutions that install such systems (as part of directives that "Leapfrog" feels will im...

OBJECTIVES The objective was to describe the interobserver agreement between trained chart reviewers and physician reviewers in a multicenter retrospective chart review study of children with cervical spine injuries (CSIs). METHODS Medical records of children younger than 16 years old with cervical spine radiography from 17 Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) hospitals ...

Cloud computing that provides cheap and pay-as-you-go computing resources is rapidly gaining momentum as an alternative to traditional IT Infrastructure. As more and more consumers delegate their tasks to cloud providers, Service Level Agreements(SLA) between consumers and providers emerge as a key aspect. Due to the dynamic nature of the cloud, continuous monitoring on Quality of Service (QoS)...

OBJECTIVE To correlate wheeze detection in the pediatric intensive care unit among staff members (a physician, nurses, and respiratory therapists [RTs]) and digital recordings from a computerized respiratory sound monitor (PulmoTrack). METHODS We prospectively studied 11 patients in the pediatric intensive care unit. A physician, nurses, and RTs auscultated the patients and recorded their opi...

OBJECTIVE Joint counts have a central role in assessing disease activity in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). They are usually undertaken by physicians or nurses. We investigated whether joint counts can be devolved to patients and evaluated the use of a patient-derived Disease Activity Score (DAS). METHODS One hundred RA patients attending a specialist unit were evaluated, comparing joint counts by...

BACKGROUND Verbal autopsy (VA) is a widely used method for analyzing cause of death in absence of vital registration systems. We adapted the InterVA method to extrapolate causes of death for stillbirths and neonatal deaths from verbal autopsy questionnaires, using data from Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Nepal. METHODS We obtained 734 stillbirth and neonatal VAs from recent community studies in rural ...

PURPOSE Patient satisfaction with disease control of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an important component of medical management. This analysis evaluated patient and physician satisfaction with disease control of SLE, factors associated with satisfaction/dissatisfaction, and the degree of physician-patient concordance of these parameters. PATIENTS AND METHODS Data were extracted from t...

INTRODUCTION Patient satisfaction is a commonly assessed dimension of emergency department (ED) care quality. The ability of ED clinicians to estimate patient satisfaction is unknown. We sought to evaluate the ability of emergency medicine resident physicians and nurses to predict patient-reported satisfaction with physician and nursing care, pain levels, and understanding of discharge instruct...