Search

Background Aim Methods Results Conclusions Electronic medical records (EMRs) provide multiple efficiencies in communication to clinicians. The ability to copy and paste text in an EMR can be useful; however, it also conveys a risk of inaccurate documentation. Studies in international settings have described such overuse of copying to result in ‘note bloat’, with the dilution of relevant clinical information and potential clinical detriment.To determine the frequency of erroneous copying, characterise the component of notes in which this occurs and determine the performance of similarity metrics in the prediction of notes likely to have erroneous copying.A cross‐sectional evaluation of all ward round notes over a 48‐h period for all long‐stay (>48 h) medical services, except the Acute Medical Unit, at the Lyell McEwin Hospital, a 257‐bed tertiary hospital in South Australia. Four similarity metrics were evaluated: longest‐sequential series of unchanged characters, similarity score (Difflib SequenceMatcher), Levenshtein distance and the Jaccard index.One hundred twenty‐eight patients were included. The number of patients who had a ward round note on two consecutive days was 97 out of 128 (75.8%). Erroneous copying was found in 8.3% of ward round notes. All (eight out of eight, 100%) of these instances of erroneous copying were in the ‘issues list’. A threshold of >850 unchanged sequential characters, when compared with the ward round note the preceding day, demonstrated reasonable performance in the prediction of erroneous copying.Erroneous copying may occur in up to 8.3% of ward round notes in a variety of medical services. Automated strategies to help address this issue should be explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pushing selected information to clinicians, as opposed to the traditional method of clinicians pulling information from an electronic medical record, has the potential to improve care. A digital notification platform was designed by clinicians and implemented in a tertiary hospital to flag dysglycaemia. There were 112 patients included in the study, and the post‐implementation group demonstrated lower rates of dysglycaemia (2.5% vs 1.1%, P = 0.038). These findings raise considerations for information delivery methods for multiple domains in contemporary healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To evaluate the effect of a clinician-designed digital notification system on the use of intravenous paracetamol during a medication shortage., Methods: An in-house digital notification platform was designed through multidisciplinary collaboration. A 4-week pre- and post-implementation methodology was employed to evaluate the effect of the intervention., Key Findings: There was significantly lower use of intravenous paracetamol in the post-implementation period compared to the pre-implementation period (median 80 doses per day, interquartile range 58 to 93, vs 94, interquartile range 83 to 122, P < .001)., Conclusions: Multidisciplinary clinician-designed digital notification platforms may assist during times of medication shortage., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.)