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Marilyn Paterno

Publications and source records attributed to Marilyn Paterno.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Creating an enterprise-wide allergy repository at Partners HealthCare System.

A significant fraction of medication errors and preventable adverse drug events are related to drug-allergy interactions (DAIs). Computerized prescribing can help prevent DAIs, but an accurate record of the patient's allergies is required. At Partners HealthCare System in Boston, the patient's allergy list is distributed across several applications including computer physician order entry (CPOE), the outpatient medical record, pharmacy applications, and nurse charting applications. Currently, each application has access only to its own allergy data. This paper presents details of a project designed to integrate the various allergy repositories at Partners. We present data documenting that patients have allergy data stored in multiple repositories. We give detail about issues we are encountering such as which applications should participate in the repository, whether "NKA" or "NKDA" should be used to document known absence of allergies, and which personnel should be allowed to enter allergies. The issues described in this paper may well be faced by other initiatives intended to create comprehensive allergy repositories.

Boston↗

Enterprise-wide drug-drug interaction alerting system.

According to the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) 1999 report To Err is Human: Building a safer Health System, "medical errors kill some 44,000-98,0001 people in U.S. hospitals each year. Partners HealthCare System (PHS) is a large integrated delivery network in Boston, MA, which has as a goal improving patient care by preventing adverse drug events (ADE) and reducing medication errors enterprise-wide. PHS has developed a drug-drug Interaction (DDI) detection feature, for the suite of clinical applications currently used by its two major teaching institutions, Brigham & Women's Hospital (BWH) and Mass General Hospital (MGH). The following clinical applications will be using this drug-drug interaction feature: NICU Order Entry (OE) at BWH, MGH OE for pediatrics and adults, the Partners outpatient medical record, The LMR, and BICS OE at BWH.

Algorithms↗

Automating complex guidelines for chronic disease: lessons learned.

There is scant published experience with implementing complex, multistep computerized practice guidelines for the long-term management of chronic diseases. We have implemented a system for creating, maintaining, and navigating computer-based clinical algorithms integrated with our electronic medical record. This article describes our progress and reports on lessons learned that might guide future work in this field. We discuss issues and obstacles related to choosing and adapting a guideline for electronic implementation, representing and executing the guideline as a computerized algorithm, and integrating it into the clinical workflow of outpatient care. Although obstacles were encountered at each of these steps, the most difficult were related to workflow integration.

Algorithms↗