LA Net Advisory
Council Members

John A Kotick, JD (Chairman)
Family Health Care Centers of Greater Los Angeles

Mohsen Bazargan, Ph.D.
Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science

Condessa Curley, MD
Eisner Pediatrics and Family Medical Center

Ignacio DeArtola , MD
Cleaver Family Wellness Center

Grace Floutsis, MD
Clinica Msr. Oscar A. Romero

Lillian Gelberg, MD, MSPH
University of California, Los Angeles

Ricardo G. Hahn, MD
University of Southern California

Sally Hur, Pharm. D.
QueensCare, Echo Park

Sarah Ingersoll, MSN, MBA, RN
American Medical Informatics Association
University of Southern California

Cristina Jose Kampher, PhD
AltaMed

June Levine. RN, MSN
Access to Care Collaborative

Carmela Lomonaco, PhD

Imelda Meza, MA
The Children’s Clinic

Kiki Nocella, PhD
University of California, Riverside

Felix Nuñez, MD, MPH
Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County

Elise Pomerance, MD
East Valley Community Health Center

Jehni Robinson, MD
The Los Angeles Free Clinic

Michael A. Rodríguez, MD, MPH
University of California, Los Angeles

Richard Seidman, MD, MPH
LA Care

Maureen Strohm, MD
California Hospital Medical Center

Ava Lenda Waldman
AIDS Research Alliance

MEADERS

The Pilot to Test a National Medication Error and Adverse Drug Event Reporting System for Ambulatory Care (MEADERS)

Patient safety has been a high profile concern ever since the publication of the Institute of Medicine’s Report To Err Is Human in 2000. Since then there has been a flurry of patient safety activity in the United States, concentrated mostly in hospitals. Primary care has been largely ignored, yet the majority of medical decisions are made in outpatient practices where there are nearly 1 billion patient encounters per year . . . The need to understand and remediate medication errors and adverse events is of most urgent importance, as these errors have significant potential to lead to patient harm and hospital admissions. Hospitals have well established protocols and systems for reporting medication errors and harms, but there is no standard, easy, national mechanism in place for primary care practices to report medication errors as they occur. With the recent passing of the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005 (S.544) that indemnifies data on errors collected as part of a quality improvement program, now is an opportune time to evaluate a primary care error reporting system, and PBRNs are an ideal place to study interventions aimed at reporting and reducing medical errors.*

The goal of this study is to design and test a user friendly primary care medication event reporting system that can be used for quality improvement at the practice level and for adverse drug event surveillance at the national level by contributing data to the FDA's MedWatch program.

MEADERS will launch on October 1, 2007

www.pcrxevents.org

LA Net is very excited to be one of four PBRNs piloting this study.

Participating Clinics:

• Cleaver Family Wellness Clinic
• East Valley Community Health Center, West Covina
• East Valley Community Health Center, Pomona
• Clinica Msr. Oscar A. Romero Community Health Center, Alvarado Street
• Clinic Msr. Oscar A. Romero Community Health Center, Marengo Street
• QueensCare, Echo Park

A presentation of findings was given at the AHRQ PBRN Conference June 2008.

*MEADERS pilot RFA page 2.

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