Improve Patient Safety by Focusing on Safe Practices for Drug Allergies

Merck_EHR

As you know, medications are a vital component to patient care. However, that care can be severely compromised if your practice doesn’t have accurate and up-to-date drug allergy information on each of your patients.

Your electronic health record (EHR) likely contains multiple types of clinical decision support (CDS) tools to help you track a patient’s drug allergies. Alerts are the most common form of CDS, but other tools exist, including informational content that is provided prior to electronic prescribing and transmission.

But despite the many CDS tools, adverse drug allergy interactions continue to occur.

To help practices curb those adverse reactions, the Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety created an online toolkit that focuses on using CDS and health information technology (HIT) to safely prescribe medications.

The Safe Practices for Drug Allergies — Using CDS and Health IT report explains the basis of using safe practices such as:

  • Using technology to standardize the documentation of drug allergy status;
  • Providing actionable drug allergy alerts to improve the safety and effectiveness of drug allergy communications;
  • Using technology to monitor the effectiveness of allergy alerts; and
  • Engaging patients through technology to provide accurate drug allergy communications.

The Partnership for Health IT Patient Safety is comprised of physicians and other health care professionals, health IT developers, academic researchers, patient safety organizations, patient advocates, and professional societies focused on technology’s role in safe drug allergy interactions.

It was convened in 2018 and is operated by ECRI Institute, a Pennsylvania-based health care nonprofit that published the online toolkit.

You also can find reports and interactive tools related to patient safety and technology at TMA’s technology and patient safety online resource center.

 

Last Updated On

September 10, 2019

Originally Published On

September 10, 2019

Related Content

EHRs