This qualitative study found that usability of the EHR inbox is often suboptimal and variable across sites, suggesting lack of shared best practices related to information management.
In this paper, we use a case study involving a project on missed/delayed follow-up of test results to discuss real-world challenges in using EHR data for patient safety research. We identify three types of challenges that pose as barriers to advance patient safety improvement research, and discuss the complexity of these challenges, all of which are unlikely to be unique to this project, and outline some key next steps that must be taken to support research that uses EHR data to improve safety.
Currently, there is no standard of care covering which DDI alerts to implement or how to display them to providers. Opportunities to improve DDI alerting include using differential displays based on DDI severity, establishing improved lists of clinically significant DDIs, and thoroughly reviewing organizational implementation decisions regarding DDIs.
Many current commercial EHRs have significant limitations in graphing capabilities of laboratory test results and often display results in nonstandardized fashion.
