Awards

• Mitchell awarded for work on medication safety
• Stern receives best article award for article on the study of hereditary improvement
• Bhavnani and team win distinguished paper award

Mitchell awarded for work on medication safety

John F. Mitchell, Pharm.D., FASHP

Early in his career, John F. Mitchell, Pharm.D., FASHP, was asked whether it was safe to crush a certain medication and administer it to a patient. When he investigated, he realized there was very little information available from pharmaceutical companies about the topic. Over the past 25 years, Mitchell has personally spearheaded the development and sharing of information related to crushing medication – his “Do Not Crush” list is used by clinicians around the world in an effort to keep patients safe. For his work, Mitchell was recognized on Dec. 4 with a Cheers Award from the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. ISMP, considered by most to be the nation’s primary authority on medication safety, publishes his list on its Web site free of charge.

The ISMP Cheers Awards honor individuals, organizations and companies that have set a superlative standard of excellence for others to follow in the prevention of medication errors and other adverse events. The awards ceremony took place in Las Vegas, with around 400 nurses, pharmacists and physicians in attendance.

“Medications are formulated to allow release over a period of time,” Mitchell explains. “If you crush a long-acting medication and give it a patient, they receive the entire dose at one time. In essence, this can lead to an overdosing of medication.”

After Mitchell realized the lack of information available about crushing medication, he sent letters to more than 100 pharmaceutical companies requesting information. As the information slowly began flowing in, the Do Not Crush list began to grow. Now, many pharmaceutical companies include crushing safety information on the inserts that accompany medications.

“The whole point of developing the reference was to share and distribute it to anyone who wants it,” Mitchell says. In addition to working in partnership with ISMP, the list is published in many healthcare references and appears bi-annually in Hospital Pharmacy, a monthly peer-reviewed journal that is read by pharmacists and other providers practicing in the inpatient and outpatient setting within hospitals, long-term care facilities, home care and other health system settings.

Mitchell came to the Health System in 1999 to work on the development of a computerized provider order entry system (CPOE). This system, UM-CareLink, was launched in 2006 and contains warnings about crushing medications.

Formerly the medication safety coordinator for the Department of Pharmacy, Mitchell is now the Ambulatory Care pharmacy coordinator. He updates the Do Not Crush list on a regular basis. The list is the primary source of crushing information worldwide.

The ISMP aims to advance patient safety worldwide by empowering the health care community, including consumers, to prevent medication errors.

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Stern receives best article award for article on the study of hereditary improvement

Alexandra Stern, Ph.D.

Alexandra Stern, Ph.D., is a historian with an interest in medical sciences and health during the twentieth century. In her work on U.S. history, she examined eugenics, the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding, in the state of Indiana. Since it was the first state to pass a eugenic sterilization law, she wrote an article that sought to understand why this “typical” American state spearheaded a policy in 1907 that today is associated with the horrors of Nazi Germany. For her article, entitled “You Can Not Make a Silk Purse out of a Sow’s Ear: Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland, 1900-1960,” Stern was the recipient of the Emma Lou and Gayle Thornbrough Award for the best article appearing in the Indiana Magazine of History in 2007.

“The article demonstrates that eugenics was much more ordinary in the early twentieth century America that we might expect,” Stern says. “In addition to sterilizations of the ‘feebleminded,’ the article also explores the better babies contests that were popular at the Indiana State Fair, and the family surveys conducted to identify the ‘degenerate’ and ‘unfit.’”

Stern is the associate director at the Center for the History of Medicine at the Medical School. Her historical research has a geographical focus on the U.S. and Latin America. She is currently engaged in several federally-funded research projects that explore topics such as genetics, infectious diseases and public health. As associate director, she helps preserve and make accessible the history of the Medical School.

Emma Lou Thornbrough was a pioneer among professional historians who have researched and published in the field of African-American history. Her sister Gayle was a retired editor and former director of the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana Historical Bureau. The Thornbrough award is given annually to recognize the best article to appear in the Indiana Magazine of History and also to honor the sisters' contributions to the history profession.

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Bhavnani and team win distinguished paper award

Suresh K. Bhavnani, Ph.D.

Thanks to research by a U-M-led interdisciplinary team, first-responders such as firemen and emergency medical personnel may soon have improved tools to more efficiently and accurately identify toxic chemicals during emergencies. The research reported in the paper, “Network Analysis of Toxic Chemicals and Symptoms: Implications for Designing First-Responder Systems,” won the Distinguished Paper Award at the American Medical Informatics Association annual symposium held in Chicago last November. The paper was led by Suresh K. Bhavnani, Ph.D., assistant research professor at the Center for Computational Medicine and Biology in the U-M Medical School, and included other investigators from the School of Information, School of Public Health, School of Public Policy and the Psychology Department at Stanford University.

The researchers used an innovative application of “graphical network analysis” to visualize and analyze the complex relationship between toxic chemical agents and the symptoms they are known to cause in people. The analysis was conducted on the database underlying WISER, a well-known hand-held system designed for first-responders, which currently requires an average of more than 40 symptoms to identify a toxic chemical. The results suggested algorithms and interfaces that should help first-responders more quickly and accurately narrow down the list of potential chemicals in emergency situations.

The AMIA symposium is the leading conference for biomedical and health informatics, and in November 2007 featured more than 100 rigorously-reviewed technical papers and attracted more than 2,000 attendees from academic, community, government and medical institutions worldwide. Co-authors on the paper were students Annie Abraham, Christopher Demeniuk, Messeret Gebrekristos and Satyendra Nainwal (from SI); Abe Gong (from Public Policy); Rudy J. Richardson, Sc.D., D.A.B.T., (from Public Health); and Gautam Vallabha (from the Department of Psychology at Stanford University).

The award-winning paper can be found at:
http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~bhavnani/papers/Bhavnani_et_al_AMIA-2007.pdf

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