Challenges implementing bar-coded medication administration in the emergency room in comparison to medical surgical units.

Bar-coded medication administration has been successfully implemented and utilized to decrease medication errors at a number of hospitals in recent years. The purpose of this article was to discuss the varying success in utilization of bar-coded medication administration on medical-surgical units and in the emergency department. Utilization reports were analyzed to better understand the challenges between the units. Many factors negatively impacted utilization in the emergency department, including the inability to use bar-coded medication administration for verbal orders or to document medications distributed by the prescribing providers, unique aspects of emergency department nursing workflow, additional steps to chart when using bar-coded medication administration, and alert fatigue. Hardware problems affected all users. Bar-coded medication administration in its current form is more suitable for use on medical-surgical floors than in the emergency department. New solutions should be developed for bar-coded medication administration in the emergency department, keeping in mind requirements to chart medications when there is no order in the system, document medications distributed by prescribing providers, adapt to unpredictable nursing workflow, minimize steps to chart with bar-coded medication administration, limit alerts to those that are clinically meaningful, and choose reliable hardware with adequate bar-code scanning capability.

Human metapneumovirus nucleoprotein and phosphoprotein interact and provide the minimal requirements for inclusion body formation.

Human metapneumovirus (HMPV) is a recently discovered paramyxovirus of the subfamily Pneumovirinae, which also includes avian pneumovirus and human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV). HMPV is an important cause of respiratory disease worldwide. To understand early events in HMPV replication, cDNAs encoding the HMPV nucleoprotein (N), phosphoprotein (P), matrix protein (M), M2-1 protein and M2-2 protein were cloned from cells infected with the genotype A1 HMPV wild-type strain TN/96-12. HMPV N and P were shown to interact using a variety of techniques: yeast two-hybrid assays, co-immunoprecipitation and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). Confocal microscopy studies showed that, when expressed individually, fluorescently tagged HMPV N and P exhibited a diffuse expression pattern in the host-cell cytoplasm of uninfected cells but were recruited to cytoplasmic viral inclusion bodies in HMPV-infected cells. Furthermore, when HMPV N and P were expressed together, they also formed cytoplasmic inclusion-like complexes, even in the absence of viral infection. FRET microscopy revealed that HMPV N and P interacted directly within cytoplasmic inclusion-like complexes. Moreover, it was shown by yeast two-hybrid analysis that the N-terminal 28 aa are required for the recruitment to and formation of cytoplasmic inclusions, but are dispensable for binding to HMPV P. This work showed that HMPV N and P proteins provide the minimal viral requirements for HMPV inclusion body formation, which may be a distinguishing characteristic of members of the subfamily Pneumovirinae.