Tailoring adverse drug event surveillance to the paediatric inpatient

Trigger Tool-Based Automated Adverse Event Detection in Electronic Health Records: Systematic Review

BACKGROUND

Adverse events in health care entail substantial burdens to health care systems, institutions, and patients. Retrospective trigger tools are often manually applied to detect AEs, although automated approaches using electronic health records may offer real-time adverse event detection, allowing timely corrective interventions.

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this systematic review was to describe current study methods and challenges regarding the use of automatic trigger tool-based adverse event detection methods in electronic health records. In addition, we aimed to appraise the applied studies' designs and to synthesize estimates of adverse event prevalence and diagnostic test accuracy of automatic detection methods using manual trigger tool as a reference standard.

METHODS

PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Library were queried. We included observational studies, applying trigger tools in acute care settings, and excluded studies using nonhospital and outpatient settings. Eligible articles were divided into diagnostic test accuracy studies and prevalence studies. We derived the study prevalence and estimates for the positive predictive value. We assessed bias risks and applicability concerns using Quality Assessment tool for Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2 (QUADAS-2) for diagnostic test accuracy studies and an in-house developed tool for prevalence studies.

RESULTS

A total of 11 studies met all criteria: 2 concerned diagnostic test accuracy and 9 prevalence. We judged several studies to be at high bias risks for their automated detection method, definition of outcomes, and type of statistical analyses. Across all the 11 studies, adverse event prevalence ranged from 0% to 17.9%, with a median of 0.8%. The positive predictive value of all triggers to detect adverse events ranged from 0% to 100% across studies, with a median of 40%. Some triggers had wide ranging positive predictive value values: (1) in 6 studies, hypoglycemia had a positive predictive value ranging from 15.8% to 60%; (2) in 5 studies, naloxone had a positive predictive value ranging from 20% to 91%; (3) in 4 studies, flumazenil had a positive predictive value ranging from 38.9% to 83.3%; and (4) in 4 studies, protamine had a positive predictive value ranging from 0% to 60%. We were unable to determine the adverse event prevalence, positive predictive value, preventability, and severity in 40.4%, 10.5%, 71.1%, and 68.4% of the studies, respectively. These studies did not report the overall number of records analyzed, triggers, or adverse events; or the studies did not conduct the analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

We observed broad interstudy variation in reported adverse event prevalence and positive predictive value. The lack of sufficiently described methods led to difficulties regarding interpretation. To improve quality, we see the need for a set of recommendations to endorse optimal use of research designs and adequate reporting of future adverse event detection studies.

Adverse drug events in hospitalized children at Ethiopian University Hospital: a prospective observational study

Background

The nature and magnitude of adverse drug events (ADEs) among hospitalized children in low-income countries is not well described. The aim of this study was thus, to assess the incidence and nature of ADEs in hospitalized children at a teaching hospital in Ethiopia.

Methods

We used prospective observational method to study children that were hospitalized to Jimma University Specialized Hospital between 1 February and 1 May 2011. ADEs were identified using review of treatment charts, interview of patient and care-giver, attendance at ward rounds and/or meetings and voluntary staff reports. Two senior pediatric residents evaluated the severity and preventability of ADEs using preset criteria. Logistic regression analysis was employed to determine predictors of ADEs.

Results

There were 634 admissions with 6182 patient-days of hospital stay. There were 2072 written medication orders accounting for 35,117 medication doses. Fifty eight ADEs were identified with an incidence of 9.2 per 100 admissions, 1.7 per 1000 medication doses and 9.4 per 1000 patient-days. One-third of ADEs were preventable; 47 % of these were due to errors in the administration stage of medication use process. Regarding the severity of ADEs, 91 % caused temporary harms and 9 % resulted in permanent harm/death. Anti-infective drugs were the most common medications associated with ADEs. The occurrence of ADEs increased with age, length of hospital stay, and use of CNS, endocrine and antihistamine medicines.

Conclusion

ADEs are common in hospitalized children in low-income settings; however, one-third deemed preventable. A strategy to prevent the occurrence and consequences of ADEs including education of nurses/physicians is of paramount importance.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12887-015-0401-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.