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.