New York City-based Montefiore Medical Center, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine-Yeshiva University in the Bronx, N.Y., and Boston-based Brigham and Women's Hospital will study the effects of health IT on patient safety, thanks to a $300,000 grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Specifically, the organizations will examine "wrong patient" electronic orders to help determine the best format for computerized provider order entry systems.
"CPOE systems have been shown to prevent many types of medical errors, but certain types of errors occur frequently in these systems, including placing orders on the wrong patient," Jason Adelman, MD, Montefiore Medical Center's patient safety officer and an assistant professor of medicine at Einstein, said. "We propose to do a prospective, observational study that examines the relationship between the number of records open at the time of placing an order and the risk of placing an order on the wrong patient."
The grant is part of a $4 million fund from Congress to finance AHRQ's support for research on health IT's impact on patient safety.