In patients with acute coronary syndromes, cardiac troponin I levels provide useful prognostic information and permit the early identification of patients with an increased risk of death.

While evidence-based medicine has increasingly broad-based support in health care, it remains difficult to get physicians to actually practice it. Across most domains in medicine, practice has lagged behind knowledge by at least several years. The authors believe that the key tools for closing this gap will be information systems that provide decision support to users at the time they make decisions, which should result in improved quality of care. Furthermore, providers make many errors, and clinical decision support can be useful for finding and preventing such errors. Over the last eight years the authors have implemented and studied the impact of decision support across a broad array of domains and have found a number of common elements important to success. The goal of this report is to discuss these lessons learned in the interest of informing the efforts of others working to make the practice of evidence-based medicine a reality.

Transient myocardial ischemia was associated with an immediate rise in circulating BNP levels, and the magnitude of rise was proportional to the severity of ischemia. These findings demonstrate an important link between the severity of an acute ischemic insult and the circulating levels of BNP.

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Other hospitals may be able to save money and improve patient safety by investing in CPOE systems.

An automatic alerting system reduced the time until an appropriate treatment was ordered for patients who had critical laboratory results. Information technologies that facilitate the transmission of important patient data can potentially improve the quality of care.

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Vancomycin trough levels are recommended to predict vancomycin efficacy, and inaccurate levels may lead to inappropriate clinical actions. However, the frequency of timing errors and associated clinical impact is unknown. We retrospectively analyzed vancomycin levels (n = 2,597) measured during 13 months at a large academic medical center. Of the specimens, 41.3% were drawn too early. These samples yielded significantly higher average ± SD vancomycin concentrations than correctly timed samples (22.1 ± 11.7 mg/L vs 15.5 mg/L ± 8.6 mg/L; P < .001), and, consequently, clinicians were more likely to decrease, discontinue, or hold a patient's vancomycin dose (25.6% vs 21.4%; P < .02) or repeat the vancomycin level (29.2% vs 20.0%; P < .001). A substantial proportion of specimens collected to assess vancomycin efficacy were drawn too early, leading to overestimation of patients' true trough level and possible underdosing of vancomycin or a high rate of repeat tests for vancomycin.