University of Illinois-Chicago
The goal of The University of Illinois-Chicago Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics (CERT) is to improve patient safety by developing and refining tools for safer medication use. According to the Institute of Medicine, as many as 1.5 million Americans suffer illness, injury, or death each year due to adverse drug events brought about by prescribing errors. Drug therapy is the most common medical service patients receive, but it is plagued by risks and hazards.
The UIC CERT is engaged in researching and developing targeted tools that optimize the efficacy, safety, and cost-effectiveness of drug therapy. Current research is focused on:
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Developing and applying a multivariate, person-time logistic regression model for large-scale adverse drug event screening.
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Improving safety and effectiveness of inpatient acute pain care by developing and validating a web-based simulator to train prescribers in the proper selection and dosing of opioids.
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Refining a standard battery of tests for pre-market safety screening of drug names, and developing and testing methods for preventing and detecting drug name confusion errors using electronic medical records.
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Evaulating a low literacy strategy for promoting safe and effective prescription medication use among English and Spanish-speaking patients in an urban primary care setting.
Some past research projects include:
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Revitalizing the drug formulary as an evidenced based tool for directing drug therapy decisions.
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Re-engineering drug usage review (DUR) systems and processes so that data analysis is easier, more timely and more likely to yield valid generalizations.
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Reducing prescribing errors and enhancing recognition of adverse drug effects in high hazard contexts by linking lab and pharmacy information systems and generating clinical alerts when problems are detected.
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Developing, deploying and evaluating an N-of-1 trial service, integrated into a formulary restriction program, in order to support the goal of individualized therapy without succumbing to the unsafe and unscientific experimentation.
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Implementing the impact of pharmacoeconomic support to enhance formulary decision making, as well as evaluating the cost-effectiveness of other interventions.
Editor's Note: The UIC CERT was featured in an article on the National Patient Safety Foundation Web site on March 17, 2012. Read the article in the Web site's Research news section.
These items by or about the UIC CERT are posted on CHAIN Online:
