Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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There are widespread and growing concerns about the variable and too often inadequate quality of health care in the United States. As a result, health care quality is being questioned and subjected to scrutiny as never before. ⋯ Emergency medicine will definitely be affected by the quality improvement movement and should quickly move forward to define and establish performance measures for high-quality emergency care in an era when chronic disease dominates the agenda. Emergency medicine should also aggressively work to operationalize a culture of quality to minimize medical errors, to practice evidence-based medicine, to translate research results into clinical practice in a timely manner, and to establish accountability mechanisms for quality improvement and clinical excellence.
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To determine whether computer-assisted prescription writing reduces the frequency of prescription errors in the emergency department (ED). ⋯ Computer-assisted prescriptions were more than three times less likely to contain errors and five times less likely to require pharmacist clarification than handwritten prescriptions.
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To develop and apply a systematic approach to identify and define valid, relevant, and feasible measures of emergency department (ED) clinical performance. ⋯ Using a Modified-Delphi process, it was possible to identify a series of condition-outcome pairs that panelists felt were potentially related to ED quality of care, then define specific indicators for many of these condition-outcome pairs. Some indicators could be measured using an existing data set. The development of sound clinical performance indicators for the ED is possible, but the feasibility of measuring them will be dependent on the availability and accessibility of high-quality data.