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Racial-ethnic minorities receive lower quality and intensity of health care compared with whites across a wide range of preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic services and disease entities. These disparities in health care contribute to continuing racial-ethnic disparities in the burden of illness and death. Several national medical organizations and the Institute of Medicine have issued position papers and recommendations for the elimination of health care disparities. However, physicians in practice are often at a loss for how to translate these principles and recommendations into specific interventions in their own clinical practices. This paper serves as a blueprint for translating principles for the elimination of racial-ethnic disparities in health care into specific actions that are relevant for individual clinical practices. We describe what is known about reducing racial-ethnic disparities in clinical practice and make recommendations for how clinician leaders can apply this evidence to transform their own practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The objective of this paper was to describe primary care prescribers' perspectives on electronic prescribing drug alerts at the point of prescribing.Design: We used a mixed-method study which included clinician surveys (web-based and paper) and focus groups with prescribers and staff.Participants: Prescribers (n = 157) working in one of 64 practices using 1 of 6 e-prescribing technologies in 6 US states completed the quantitative survey and 276 prescribers and staff participated in focus groups.Measurements: The study measures self-reported frequency of overriding of drug alerts; open-ended responses to: "What do you think of the drug alerts your software generates for you?"Results: More than 40% of prescribers indicated they override drug-drug interactions most of the time or always (range by e-prescribing system, 25% to 50%). Participants indicated that the software and the interaction alerts were beneficial to patient safety and valued seeing drug-drug interactions for medications prescribed by others. However, they noted that alerts are too sensitive and often unnecessary. Participant suggestions included: (1) run drug alerts on an active medication list and (2) allow prescribers to set the threshold for severity of alerts.Conclusions: Primary care prescribers recognize the patient safety value of drug prescribing alerts embedded within electronic prescribing software. Improvements to increase specificity and reduce alert overload are needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]