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UB receives patient designation status

Business First of Buffalo - by Tracey Drury

The University at Buffalo has received a federal designation that will allow it to play a greater role in improving patient safety.

The Medication Management Research Network, part of the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, was designated as a Patient Safety Organization by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

UB is the first academic institution statewide to receive the designation and only the second PSO named in the state.
The Medication Management Research Network was established last year by the COE and UB’s School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences with the goal of establishing a statewide infrastructure for conducting research in medication management. Gene Morse, principal investigator on the MMRN, is a professor in the pharmacy school associate director of the UB Center of Excellence.

In a prepared release, he says the federal designation will give the network the ability to conduct research on how specific health care decisions impact patient outcomes and health care costs, as well as report back to health care providers on patterns discovered through data analysis.

“It allows us to identify issues quickly, develop improved early warning systems that communicate ways to reduce risk and improve quality and to set up mechanisms through which we will report back to the clinical sites so that they can then take steps to efficiently avoid potentially dangerous and costly medication errors,” he says.

Currently, the UB PSO is working with health care providers in Western New York to collect, store and analyze “de-identified” information from patients with HIV/AIDS, kidney disease and diabetes. Funding comes through Health Research Inc. of the State Department of Health through its Pharmaceutical Safety Initiative.