Renowned health system extends use of First DataBank to new clinician-friendly medication ordering content.

First DataBank has announced that Partners HealthCare has licensed First DataBank’s new CPOE-ready drug database, OrderView Med Knowledge Base™. The licensing of OrderView extends a long and fruitful business relationship between Partners and First DataBank.

Partners is a pioneer in the use of computerized physician order entry (CPOE). In a series of groundbreaking studies that began in the mid 1990’s, Brigham and Women’s Hospital physician David Bates, MD, demonstrated the value of CPOE for reducing adverse drug events. Since that time, CPOE use at Partners has spread to virtually all of the organization’s medication orders. The widespread adoption is testament to a system that is user-friendly and improves patient safety.

Its early development of CPOE also puts Partners in the unusual position of being one of a limited number of hospital systems in the country to have worked for years with a mature CPOE system. That experience, along with the fact that until now Partners has developed and maintained all its own CPOE content, has enabled Partners to develop a clear sense of what works and what doesn’t.

“We’ve determined that as long as we have a reliable, professional content source, it’s easier and more cost-efficient to customize the content where necessary, rather than building our entire database from scratch and maintaining it,” said Carol Broverman, PhD, Partners’ corporate manager of Medication Informatics and Clinical Informatics Research and Development. “For us, First DataBank is a proven entity and we believe OrderView will be valuable support for our CPOE system, and a reliable bridge to a wealth of current industry-ready clinical content related to medications.”

“Patient safety is First DataBank’s primary concern,” said Don Nielsen, MD, and CEO of First DataBank. “Thanks in large part to Partners we know that when done well, CPOE can improve patient safety. But we also know that those implementing CPOE need a medication ordering database that is sustainable, cost-effective, and clinician-friendly. That’s why we developed OrderView. So it’s especially gratifying that Partners – with its well-earned reputation for quality care and addressing adverse drug events using CPOE – has selected us to support their CPOE system.”

”Building the medication ordering content that supports CPOE applications is a significant task for CPOE implementers, whether or not they build a homegrown system or purchase one from a vendor,” said Virginia Halsey, First DataBank’s product management director. “Without a whole infrastructure and content collection process in place, it’s really hard to research and rigorously test the data efficiently in a clinical environment. With OrderView, a dedicated team of clinical pharmacists and QA professionals do the research and testing for you.”

“Even at an institution like Partners where significant resources are dedicated to developing and maintaining this content, it isn’t always worthwhile to build everything yourself,” said Dr. Broverman. “Just consider all the facets of an order – such as doses, frequencies, rounding increments, instructions – and then add on the need to link to constantly changing dispensable formulations.”

OrderView content promotes accuracy by providing validated dose and frequency selections for a particular drug. It also optimizes the concept of pre-built “orderable medications” that enable clinicians to arrive at their order in the fewest possible steps, a need identified early and reflected in the way that Partners built its content. The content supports such things as dose adjustments for organ impairment, mg/kg calculations and rounding for final doses, and pediatric and discharge orders.

The selections also provide translation for discharge prescriptions and patient instructions. This approach contrasts favorably with a generalized dose or warning message – after the fact – that a dose might not be appropriate. It also helps minimize alert fatigue, a problem too often associated with clinical decision support.

“In fact, because OrderView links to other First DataBank concepts, we gain another advantage: the ability to make full use of First DataBank’s clinical decision support databases,” said Dr. Broverman. “The linkage of order-related content to downstream uses for pharmacy and quality data management is a critical linchpin to the provision of a closed-loop solution for medication management.”

About Partners HealthCare
Partners HealthCare, located in Boston, Massachusetts, is an integrated health system founded by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in 1994. In addition to its two academic medical centers, the Partners system also includes community hospitals, specialty hospitals, community health centers, a physician network, home health and long-term care services, and other health-related entities. Partners is one of the nation's leading biomedical research organizations and a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. Partners HealthCare is a non-profit organization. For more information, visit www.partners.org.

About First DataBank
First DataBank, a subsidiary of Hearst Corporation, is the leading provider of electronic drug information to the healthcare industry. We pioneered the concept of creating executable drug knowledge that's designed to be relevant from the perspectives of multiple end users. For more than two decades, we've partnered with information system developers to deliver proven knowledge bases for integration into a wide range of applications all across the healthcare continuum, with particular expertise in clinical decision support within the workflow. Together with our development partners, First DataBank helps reduce the incidence of medication errors and adverse drug events, which promises to lower healthcare costs and improve patient care. For more information, visit: www.firstdatabank.com.

© 2006, First DataBank, Inc. A subsidiary of Hearst Corporation. All trademarks mentioned herein are the properties of their respective owners.

David Manin, Director of Marketing
650-872-4588
david_manin@firstdatabank.com

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