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Awardees Focused on Vaccine Safety, Opioid Management, Technology

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is proud to announce the 27th Annual Cheers Award winners, who have worked to significantly reduce vaccine-related errors and improve opioid management, and the Michael R. Cohen Lifetime Award winner whose groundbreaking work has confirmed how technology such as computerized order entry (CPOE) can help advance medication safety.

The awards ceremony will be held on Tuesday, December 10, 2024, at the Civic Theater in New Orleans. The annual ISMP Cheers Awards honor individuals, organizations, and companies that have set a standard of excellence in medication safety; for more information, visit: https://www.ismp.org/cheers-awards.

“This year’s ISMP Cheers Award winners are ahead of the curve in terms of finding innovative ways to use technology to prevent medication errors,” says ISMP President Rita K. Jew. “These dedicated organizations and leaders set a high bar for the rest of the healthcare community to emulate.”

The winners of this year’s ISMP Cheers Awards are:

Cook Children’s Health Care System

Fort Worth, TX

The Quality Improvement Team at Cook Children’s Health Care System is receiving a Cheers Award for significantly reducing the number of vaccine errors within their pediatric network. The team was formed to address errors related to immunizations, especially those involving complex vaccine age eligibility and vaccine series interval timing. They collaborated with the information technology department to integrate a clinical decision support tool into the electronic medical record system that alerts healthcare providers to potential errors in real time. Since it was implemented, more than 9,000 inappropriate vaccine orders have been successfully averted by following the guidance provided by the clinical alerts. A substantial decrease in error rates was noted for most vaccines, with the most pronounced decline for the hepatitis A series, which achieved an impressive 91% reduction. The team also implemented a dashboard-based monitoring system for patient safety to ensure continuous improvement and oversight.

Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids)

Toronto, Canada

The Perioperative Opioid Stewardship Research Program (PROSPR) at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto is being honored for improving the way opioids are managed during post-surgery hospital discharge. The program aims to address overprescribing of opioids in pediatrics, minimize the volume of unnecessary opioids entering the community, and decrease the volume of unused opioids. The program team identified risks, modified practice standards, re-evaluated processes, and expanded their reach to other diagnoses. Their achievements include using technology and QI methodology to safely decrease the amount of unused opioids retained by patients from 83% to 17% and creating a new pathway to facilitate the return and disposal of unused opioids. They also addressed language barriers and improved access by translating all educational documentation into the ten most used languages in their surgical population, allowing more families to participate.

The Michael R. Cohen Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to David W. Bates, M.D, M.Sc., an internationally renowned safety expert, for his groundbreaking work evaluating the incidence and preventability of adverse drug events and harm from medications. He has demonstrated that information technology such as CPOE and clinical decision support can decrease the risk of serious medication errors, and his research has been referred to in Health Care Financing Administration regulations, the Medicare Patient Advisory Commission’s 1999 Report to Congress, and the Institute of Medicine’s report To Err is Human. CPOE is now being implemented in health systems and facilities across the U.S. He has published more than 1,200 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited over 155,000 times and is among the 400 most cited biomedical researchers. He currently is the Medical Director of Clinical and Quality Analysis at Mass General Brigham, a Senior Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), and directs the Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice at BWH, which focuses on improving medication safety across the continuum of care and patient groups. Dr. Bates also is a professor at both Harvard Medical School and at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the editor of the Journal of Patient Safety. Dr. Bates has received multiple awards, including the first John M. Eisenberg Award for excellence in patient safety research from the National Quality Forum and the Henry Christian Award for excellence in research from the American Federation for Clinical Research.

“The Cheers Awards winners demonstrate how to make impressive advances in medication safety using innovative system-based solutions,” Dheerendra Kommala, M.D., chief medical officer at ECRI, ISMP’s affiliate organization. “We applaud their commitment to safety and ensuring quality patient care.”

About the Institute for Safe Medication Practices

The Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) is the nation’s first 501c (3) nonprofit organization devoted entirely to preventing medication errors. ISMP is known and respected for its medication safety information. For more than 25 years, it also has served as a vital force for progress. ISMP’s advocacy work alone has resulted in numerous necessary changes in clinical practice, public policy, and drug labeling and packaging. Among its many initiatives, ISMP runs the only national voluntary practitioner medication error reporting program, publishes newsletters with real-time error information read and trusted throughout the global healthcare community, and offers a wide range of unique educational programs, tools, and guidelines. In 2020, ISMP formally affiliated with ECRI to create one of the largest healthcare quality and safety entities in the world, and ECRI and the ISMP PSO is a federally certified patient safety organization by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. As a watchdog organization, ISMP receives no advertising revenue and depends entirely on charitable donations, educational grants, newsletter subscriptions, and volunteer efforts to pursue its life-saving work. Visit www.ismp.org and follow @ismp_org to learn more.

ISMP Announces 27th Annual Cheers Award Recipients