Patient/medication safety

This report explores the topic of effective individual risk management in community-based services among States engaged in risk planning for Medicaid home- and community-based services (HCBS) waiver participants. Administrators from 11 State operating agencies, representing a range of waiver types and geographic areas, were interviewed for this report. These agencies served at least one of four waiver populations (the elderly, people with physical disabilities, people with mental retardation...

This one-page tip sheet provides five simple tips for safe medication use.

This tool provides the following tips:

• Bring a list or a bag with ALL your medicines when you go to your doctor’s office, the pharmacy, or the hospital
• Ask questions about your medicines
• Make sure your medicine is what the doctor ordered
• Ask how to use the medicine correctly
• Ask about possible side effects

This table is designed as a hypothesis-testing, teaching, and reference tool for physicians and researchers interested in drug interactions that are the result of competition for or effects on the human cytochrome P450 system.

This tool provides hyperlinks from drug names to specific literature references, most of which include a link to the abstract of the article in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database. Also, the PubMed link after the drug name may be clicked on to...

Each year, Leapfrog gathers and reports information on hospital quality and patient safety efforts to help patients make informed decisions about where to receive hospital care. This tool provides a search function that patients can use to obtain information about hospitals in their area and to compare hospitals. Hospitals voluntarily submit the information shown on this site.

This tool provides the following information about hospitals:

• Computerized physician order...

This 15-page checklist will help consumers find and fix hazards in their homes that may result in falls. The checklist asks about hazards found in each room and tells how to fix the problem.

The checklist includes the following sections:

• Floors in each room
• Stairs and steps inside and outside of the home
• Kitchen and eating areas
• Bedrooms
• Bathrooms
• Other things you can do to prevent falls
• Other safety tips

This six-page guideline summary is a 2006 update of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) recommendations for the use of white blood cell growth factors.

This guideline summary addresses the following topics:

• Primary prophylactic colony-stimulating factor (CSF) administration
• Secondary prophylactic CSF administration
• Therapeutic use of CSF
• Use of CSF to increase chemotherapy dose intensity and dose density
• Use of CSF as adjuncts...

This self assessment is a comprehensive tool designed to help health care providers and their staff assess the safety of medication practices in their pharmacy, identify opportunities for improvement, and compare their experience with the aggregate experiences of demographically similar community pharmacies around the Nation.

It is divided into the following 10 elements:

• Patient information
• Drug information
• Communication of drug orders...

This one-page tool, in Microsoft(r) Word format, uses the colors of a stoplight to guide patients in managing their congestive heart failure symptoms. The tool is divided into green (“all clear”), yellow (“caution”), and red (“medical alert”) zones. For each zone, the tool provides signs and symptoms and allows the health care provider to give specific instructions for managing the condition, including guidance on when to seek emergency medical assistance.

This Web site provides consumers with detailed information about the past performance of every Medicare- and Medicaid-certified nursing home in the country. Other resources are available at the site to help consumers with their nursing home choices.

This Web site includes the following sections:

• Find–Search for nursing homes by:
  • Geography
    • State
    • County
  • Proximity
    • City
    • ZIP code
  • Name
• ...

This Web page identifies drugs that prolong the QT interval and/or induce torsades de pointes ventricular arrhythmia.

This Web page provides links to view drug lists in the following categories:

• Drugs with risk of torsades de pointes
• Drugs with possible risk of torsades de pointes
• Drugs to be avoided by congenital long-QT patients
• Drugs unlikely to cause torsades de pointes

Each list can be sorted by brand or generic name. Drugs are listed...