Introduction
Hundreds of research articles are published worldwide each year in the field of emergency medicine, making it difficult to pick just a handful of important articles for 2011. To narrow down the field, we asked our board members and contributors to select 2 or 3 research articles that resonated with them over the past year.
Here are their selections.
Computerized Decision Support for Medication Dosing in Renal Insufficiency: A Randomized, Controlled Trial
In an article published in December of 2010, Terrell and colleagues looked at whether decision support in a computerized physician order entry system would reduce the rate of excessive medication dosing for patients with renal impairment.[1] The study sample included 42 physicians who were randomly assigned evenly to intervention or control groups.
Terrell and colleagues concluded that computerized physician order entry with decision support significantly reduced excessive dosing of targeted medications.[1]
Medscape Emergency Medicine board member Nicholas Genes, MD, chose this as one of his must-read papers of 2011.
"Because I'm an informatics guy, I wanted to highlight a well-conducted trial of decision support -- not the annoying (and, frankly, dumb) alerts when giving aspirin and heparin to a patient with elevated troponins," Genes said, "but a smart use of electronic systems to correct a potentially avoidable, but often missed, interaction: overdosing prescription meds in renal insufficiency."
Medscape Emergency Medicine © 2011
WebMD, LLC
Cite this: Important Emergency Medicine Research: 2011 - Medscape - Nov 23, 2011.
Comments