A measured dose of safety; Addressing adverse drug events is among first steps prescribed as Trinity Health installs an electronic medical record system.(The Edge)

Modern Healthcare, February, 2003

Byline: Elizabeth Gardner

Trinity Health is spending $190 million during the next four years to install an electronic medical record system with sophisticated measures for decreasing medical errors. But in the interim, simple measures are working just fine for a fraction of that expense.

An ongoing ``conversation'' between Trinity's pharmacy computer system and its laboratory system is helping to avert hundreds of adverse drug events, or ADEs, per month through the simple measure of printing out alerts in its hospitals' pharmacies.

Fourteen of Trinity's 19 member health systems are using the ADE computer module, which looks at pharmacy orders and lab results together and prints out an alert in the pharmacy if the combination suggests there...

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