PEPID

Description

Trusted and used in emergency rooms around the world since 1994, PEPID covers the full spectrum of emergency medicine and is written specifically for the fast-paced environment of the ED. PEPID gives you everything you need to make accurate decisions quickly, from a differential diagnosis generator to pinpoint the cause of a patient’s symptoms to a complete toxicology reference, comprehensive drug database, drug interactions checker, dosing calculators, emergency protocols, algorithms, assessments, illustrations, and much more!

High-acuity patients and surging patient volumes combine to make the emergency department (ED) a care setting with high variability and potential for medical errors.

The ED clinical team can be greatly helped by electronic health record (EHR) tools with embedded or add-on clinical decision support (CDS) that supports both patient safety as well as throughput efficiency to reduce such risks.

While clinical decision support should not replace a provider’s knowledge, experience, intuition or judgment, it can complement the clinician’s skills and enhance the quality of care provided. The ED is an ideal setting for tools that help reduce the incidence of preventable medical errors and adverse events.

PEPID can help by:

• Reducing the risk of medication errors. Determining accurate medication doses can be daunting — and especially critical for infants and children in emergency situations. Calculations involving complex formulas are often difficult to memorize, and mathematical errors can still occur even when the formulas are accurately recalled. Varying dosing regimens based on indication and pharmacokinetics represent additional opportunities for error. In fact, more than 37 percent of harmful pediatric medication errors are caused by an improper dose or quantity.1 In the ED, CDS can give physicians and nurses easy and quick access to drug-specific dosing calculators, full drug monographs with age, weight, disease and renal adjustment dosing, and much more. Accurate medication information and dosing calculators, easily accessible within the clinical workflow, can provide a significant reduction in errors.
• Providing the entire care team with consistent, reliable information. Finding the most relevant evidence-based knowledge can be a difficult task, especially when time is critical. Internet search engines can return thousands of results with varying degrees of relevance and reliability. Medline can provide access to article abstracts, but it often cannot provide the answers clinicians need at the point of care. By arming providers with trusted resources, it is less likely that unreliable information will be used in clinical decision-making.
• Improving efficiency and patient throughput. The Institute of Medicine estimates that $17-29 billion is spent annually on unnecessary or inaccurate patient care due to misdiagnosis. If clinicians can rapidly determine the correct dose, calculation or diagnosis, they can order relevant tests and make appropriate referrals, saving time and eliminating unnecessary costs for the patients and the ED. Of course, CDS is most effective when it is built into the clinician’s workflow, which minimizes interruptions and dangerous distractions. It is also important for CDS to be incorporated into providers’ workflow in such a way that minimizes alert fatigue.
• Providing access all information in one place. Reference textbooks are generally outdated by the time they are published, take up valuable space in the ED and often cannot be found when needed. In contrast, electronic CDS systems can be continually updated and validated. The ability to access the most current medical resources in a central location eliminates the need for multiple logins or investment in additional resources.

Technical Requirements

Requires an internet connection.