Enhancing Participant Safety through Electronically Generated Medication Order Sets in a Clinical Research Environment: A Medical Informatics Initiative

While clinical medicine is often well supported by health system information technology infrastructure, clinical research may need to create strategies to use clinical‐medicine informational technology tools. The authors describe a medication‐safety initiative that was carried out in a National Institutes of Health Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA)‐sponsored clinical research environment. A web based, medical informatics application was designed and implemented that allowed research groups to build protocol specific, electronic medication templates that were subsequently used to create participant‐specific medication order sets for conductance of clinical research activities in the CTSA‐sponsored clinical research environment. The medical informatics initiative eliminated typewritten or handwritten medication orders, created research protocol‐specific templates meeting institutional order‐writing requirements, and formalized a rigorous review and approval process. Enhancing safety in medication ordering and prescribing practices in a clinical research environment provided the background for multidisciplinary cooperation in medical informatics. Clin Trans Sci 2010; Volume 3: 312–315