Health Analytics and IT Patient Safety
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Welcome

 
Welcome to the website of the Health Analytics and IT Patient Safety team at Duke Health Technology Solutions (DHTS), the information technology arm of the Duke University Health System (DUHS).  Our overarching goal is to use cutting edge technology to improve research into patient outcomes.  As administrators of both Adverse Drug Event Surveillance and the DUHS Safety Reporting System, as well as working closely with the DHTS Data Warehouse and Computerized Provider Order Entry Groups, we are uniquely positioned to use the data from these resources to drive safety initiatives.  We work to ask questions and find solutions for a multitude of healthcare quality topics.
 
 

Adverse event monitoring to prevent patient harm

   
Improving the detection and prevention of patient harm is a pressing priority of health-related agencies in the United States, particularly in the realm of medication safety (1-3).  The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends that healthcare organizations capture patient information relevant to the etiology of adverse events (AEs), as well as utilize these data to improve safety (1).  As an initial step, the detection of AEs is critical to identify and prioritize areas of high risk.  Given the highly computerized nature of DUHS hospitals, health information technology has great potential for recognizing AEs and improving patient outcomes.  We are employing adverse event surveillance, voluntary safety reporting, and real-time alerts to tackle DUHS safety concerns including medication use, patient falls, blood transfusions, and surgical site infections.  We develop metrics, apply novel data analysis techniques, and commit to bringing the right experts to the table to think through outcomes data and consider possible interventions.
  

Providing clinical researchers with a data-driven approach towards quality improvement

 
 
A key component to successful patient safety initiatives is the ability to return aggregate data back to those responsible for quality improvement (QI).  DUHS has increasingly invested in health information technology, which is providing a growing volume of electronic clinical data to supplement QI research.  But our ability to generate and store this information  is quickly outpacing our ability to make use of it.  Unfortunately, data silos on patient care sit in the DUHS data warehouse and can only be accessed through consultation with technical experts.  Therefore, a revolution in healthcare could be possible if health systems were able to quickly combine multiple data streams to answer key clinical questions.   Following the model of other industries, we intend to use business intelligence methods DUHS-wide to transform this mountain of raw data into a coherent analysis package to fuel knowledge discovery.    We also act as translational subject matter experts in the creation of tools that allow researchers to mine clinical data marts in support of their own research questions.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1. Institute of Medicine.  Preventing Medication Errors:  Quality Chasm Series. Washington, DC: National Academy Press; 2006.
2. Phillips DP, Bredder CC. Morbidity and mortality from medical errors: an increasingly serious public health problem. Annu Rev Public Health 2002;23:135-50.
 
3. Patient safety: Achieving a new standard of care. In: Institute of Medicine Report. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press; 2004.
 
4. Bates DW, Spell N, Cullen DJ, Burdick E, Laird N, Petersen LA, et al. The costs of adverse drug events in hospitalized patients. Adverse Drug Events Prevention Study Group. JAMA 1997;277(4):307-11.  
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