[Electronic drug prescription - auto pilot for drug therapy?]. / Elektronische Arzneimittelverordnung - Autopilot in der Arzneimitteltherapie? Eine Literatur- und Datenanalyse.

In tertiary care, computerized physician order entries may improve performance, cross-linking, and documentation when prescribing drugs. A clinical decision support integrated in these systems is discussed to prevent additional medication errors. For an optimal performance, the implementation into the clinical information systems is required to gain access to patient data (e. g. from laboratory). In routine care, the question rises whether a benefit of the systems can be proven in clinical studies and whether there is a difference between the systems. To achieve optimal results, these systems should also consider specific requirements, i. e. the patient groups and prescribed drugs in the local setting. We performed a systematic literature evaluation searching for published data in the topic electronic prescribing to assess them in a structured analysis considering medical-pharmaceutical aspects. Additionally, we assessed three databases in German language and one in English language taking drug-drug-interactions as an example to compare the identification of drug-related problems. Medication data from our own patients in a paediatric intensive care unit of a university hospital were analysed by the systems. Our results revealed strengths but also limitations of electronic prescribing.

Smart Medical Information Technology for Healthcare (SMITH).

INTRODUCTION: This article is part of the Focus Theme of Methods of Information in Medicine on the German Medical Informatics Initiative. "Smart Medical Information Technology for Healthcare (SMITH)" is one of four consortia funded by the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MI-I) to create an alliance of universities, university hospitals, research institutions and IT companies. SMITH's goals are to establish Data Integration Centers (DICs) at each SMITH partner hospital and to implement use cases which demonstrate the usefulness of the approach. OBJECTIVES: To give insight into architectural design issues underlying SMITH data integration and to introduce the use cases to be implemented. GOVERNANCE AND POLICIES: SMITH implements a federated approach as well for its governance structure as for its information system architecture. SMITH has designed a generic concept for its data integration centers. They share identical services and functionalities to take best advantage of the interoperability architectures and of the data use and access process planned. The DICs provide access to the local hospitals' Electronic Medical Records (EMR). This is based on data trustee and privacy management services. DIC staff will curate and amend EMR data in the Health Data Storage. METHODOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FRAMEWORK: To share medical and research data, SMITH's information system is based on communication and storage standards. We use the Reference Model of the Open Archival Information System and will consistently implement profiles of Integrating the Health Care Enterprise (IHE) and Health Level Seven (HL7) standards. Standard terminologies will be applied. The SMITH Market Place will be used for devising agreements on data access and distribution. 3LGM2 for enterprise architecture modeling supports a consistent development process.The DIC reference architecture determines the services, applications and the standardsbased communication links needed for efficiently supporting the ingesting, data nourishing, trustee, privacy management and data transfer tasks of the SMITH DICs. The reference architecture is adopted at the local sites. Data sharing services and the market place enable interoperability. USE CASES: The methodological use case "Phenotype Pipeline" (PheP) constructs algorithms for annotations and analyses of patient-related phenotypes according to classification rules or statistical models based on structured data. Unstructured textual data will be subject to natural language processing to permit integration into the phenotyping algorithms. The clinical use case "Algorithmic Surveillance of ICU Patients" (ASIC) focusses on patients in Intensive Care Units (ICU) with the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). A model-based decision-support system will give advice for mechanical ventilation. The clinical use case HELP develops a "hospital-wide electronic medical record-based computerized decision support system to improve outcomes of patients with blood-stream infections" (HELP). ASIC and HELP use the PheP. The clinical benefit of the use cases ASIC and HELP will be demonstrated in a change of care clinical trial based on a step wedge design. DISCUSSION: SMITH's strength is the modular, reusable IT architecture based on interoperability standards, the integration of the hospitals' information management departments and the public-private partnership. The project aims at sustainability beyond the first 4-year funding period.

On Teaching International Courses on Health Information Systems. Lessons Learned during 16 Years of Frank - van Swieten Lectures on Strategic Information Management in Health Information Systems.

BACKGROUND: Health information systems (HIS) are one of the most important areas for biomedical and health informatics. In order to professionally deal with HIS well-educated informaticians are needed. Because of these reasons, in 2001 an international course has been established: The Frank - van Swieten Lectures on Strategic Information Management of Health Information Systems. OBJECTIVES: Reporting about the Frank - van Swieten Lectures and about our students' feedback on this course during the last 16 years. Summarizing our lessons learned and making recommendations for such international courses on HIS. METHODS: The basic concept of the Frank - van Swieten lectures is to teach the theoretical background in local lectures, to organize practical exercises on modelling sub-information systems of the respective local HIS and finally to conduct Joint Three Days as an international meeting were the resulting models are introduced and compared. RESULTS: During the last 16 years, the Universities of Amsterdam, Braunschweig, Heidelberg/Heilbronn, Leipzig as well as UMIT were involved in running this course. Overall, 517 students from these universities participated. Our students' feedback was clearly positive. The Joint Three Days of the Frank - van Swieten Lectures, where at the end of the course all students can meet, turned out to be an important component of this course. Based on the last 16 years, we recommend common teaching materials, agreement on equivalent clinical areas for the exercises, support of group building of international student groups, motivation of using a collaboration platform, ensuring quality management of the course, addressing different levels of knowledge of the students, and ensuring sufficient funding for joint activities. CONCLUSIONS: Although associated with considerable additional efforts, we can clearly recommend establishing such international courses on HIS, such as the Frank - van Swieten Lectures.

Process frame instances for integrating strategic, tactical and operational information management in hospitals.

An approach to reduce the complexity of information management is to distinguish it into strategic, tactical and operational management with each of the levels using its own software tools. In practice, the management levels are tightly connected and interact closely. The most evident information that has to be interchanged between the management levels is the information about finished, cancelled, running and planned activities or projects, respectively. We claim that the levels of information management should share information about the work done, and propose their integration by means of a network of so-called process frame instances. Process frame instances hold information about the activities of different information management levels in a structured and reusable way.