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Dr. David Bates
Harcard Medical School
Bringham and Women's Hospital
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Harvard Medical School
Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care
Department of Medicine
1620 Tremont Street, BC3-2M
Boston, MA 02120-1613
Tel: 617-732-5650, Fax 617-732-7072
E-mail: dbates@partners.org |
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
David W. Bates, MD, MSc
Chief, Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Medical Director, Clinical and Quality Analysis
Partners HealthCare System, Inc.
Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Health Policy and Management
Harvard School of Public Health |
June 27, 2011
Letter of Recommendation for SURVEYOR Health
As one who has spent much of my career in the area of adverse drug events (ADEs) it brings me great pleasure to recognize SURVEYOR Health’s contributions to the field. The field has been primarily focused on labor-intensive manual chart review and drug interaction checkers with a secondary emphasis on retrospective data mining to better understand the risks of medication therapy. My own group’s work has quantified the costs of ADEs, identified triggers for ADE detection and researched the improvement of systems to combat medication errors.
SURVEYOR Health has taken a novel approach, providing integrated decision support at the point of care in real time. I believe the tool will be helpful in screening, diagnosing, and resolving ADEs, uniquely showing the risk of side effects from the additive toxicities of polypharmacy in addition to drug interactions and contraindications.
Doctor's don't like false signals and excessive alerts, by contrast, this well designed information system allows the user to control their view, seeing only the most relevant details from the entire medication regimen. The visual Medication Risk Maps can bring the provider’s focus to patient symptoms and complaints that are likely to be ADEs and help the provider identify which of the patient’s meds are contributing the greatest risk toward these. That is valuable in and of itself but they also provide the means to try out changes of therapy on the computer and see the impact on risks, before the changes are scripted and dispensed. This capability is also unique in the industry.
The greatest complement I can pay them is that they’re truly helping the clinician in practicing the art of medicine by using computation and visualization to get the irrelevant out of the way while bringing focus to what matters in the clinical context.
Sincerely,
David W. Bates, MD, MSc
Chief, Division of General Internal Medicine
and Primary Care
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