Jasmine Jones

Impact of a pharmacist-facilitated hospital discharge program: a quasi-experimental study.

BACKGROUND Medication discrepancies are common at hospital discharge and can result in adverse events, hospital readmissions, and emergency department visits. Our objectives were to characterize medication discrepancies at hospital discharge and test the effects of a pharmacist intervention on health care utilization following discharge. METHODS We used a prospective, alternating month quasi-experimental design to compare outcomes of patients receiving the intervention (n = 358) with controls (n = 366). All patients were discharged to home and were at high risk for medication-related problems following discharge because of the number or types of medications they were prescribed, multiple medication changes during hospitalization, or problems managing medications. The intervention consisted of medication therapy assessment, medication reconciliation, screening for adherence concerns, patient counseling and education, and postdischarge telephone follow-up. The primary outcomes were 14-day and 30-day readmission rates and emergency department visits within 72 hours of discharge. Medication discrepancies occurring at discharge were also characterized. RESULTS Medication discrepancies at discharge were identified in 33.5% of intervention patients and 59.6% of control patients (P < .001). Although all discrepancies were resolved in the intervention group prior to discharge, readmission rates did not differ significantly between groups at 14 days (12.6% vs 11.5%; P = .65) and 30 days (22.1% vs 18%; P = .17), nor did emergency department visits (2.8% vs 2.2%, respectively; P = .60). CONCLUSION While our intervention improved the quality of patient discharge by identifying and reconciling medication discrepancies at discharge, there was no effect on postdischarge health care resource utilization.

An Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experience in Transitional Care

Objectives. To implement and assess a 4-week advanced pharmacy practice experience in transitional care. Design. Students participated in the transitional care planning of patients being discharged from 4 general medicine services. Students interviewed patients; assessed discharge medications; reconciled preadmission and discharge medications; provided medication counseling; and conducted postdischarge follow-up by phone to assist patients with medication-related problems and identify additional concerns. Assessment. Student involvement increased the number of patients who could be assessed and interviewed by the pharmacist preceptor from 10 patients/day to 15 to 20 patients/day. Students strengthened their provider-patient and provider-provider communication skills and developed skills in identifying and resolving barriers to medication adherence. Conclusion. This transitional care APPE provided students an opportunity to gain experience and self-confidence in the application of pharmaceutical care skills in a transitional care setting, while also providing valuable patient care services to the hospital.

Kurator: Using The Crowd to Help Families With Personal Curation Tasks

People capture photos, audio recordings, video, and more on a daily basis, but organizing all these digital artifacts quickly becomes a daunting task. Automated solutions struggle to help us manage this data because they cannot understand its meaning. In this paper, we introduce Kurator, a hybrid intelligence system leveraging mixed-expertise crowds to help families curate their personal digital content. Kurator produces a refined set of content via a combination of automated systems able to scale to large data sets and human crowds able to understand the data. Our results with 5 families show that Kurator can reduce the amount of effort needed to find meaningful memories within a large collection. This work also suggests that crowdsourcing can be used effectively even in domains where personal preference is key to accurately solving the task.

Co-constructing Family Memory: Understanding the Intergenerational Practices of Passing on Family Stories

Sharing family stories is an integral aspect of how families remember together and build a sense of connection. Yet, when generations in families are separated by large geographic and temporal distances, the everyday taken-for-granted processes of sharing family stories shift from conversational to mediated forms. To inform HCI research and practice in mediating family stories, we contribute an account of the co-constructive intergenerational social practices enacted to co-construct and interpret family stories. These practices demonstrate the agency of both storytellers and listeners as they work to discover, decipher, and reconstruct family stories. We close by drawing insights from this setting to frame key design challenges for multi-lifespan information systems mediating asynchronous, asymmetric, co-constructive and socially weighted information sharing interactions.

Counteracting dampeners: understanding technology-amplified capabilities of people with disabilities in Sierra Leone

This paper presents an ethnographically-based account on the impact of technologies appropriated in the livelihood strategies of people with disabilities (PWDs) in Sierra Leone, West Africa. In contrast to other developing countries, Sierra Leone presents a situation where people with disabilities are socially marginalized but not necessarily wholly disadvantaged. Through a lens of technology-amplified capabilities we show how PWDs leverage information and communication technologies (ICTs) to counteract social dampeners they regularly experience that prevent their participation in society. We discuss the role of the war experience and its impact on services and attitudes towards people with disability and how disruptive contexts can open up opportunities to support and amplify existing life skills towards development goals.

Assistive technologies and autonomy in a cyborg world

This note discusses the use of cyborg theory to study assistive technology (AT) use by people with visual impairment (VI) in development contexts. We argue that the deep intimate interconnections that people form with their AT, while allowing them to become cyborgs, also become the means by which they can be regulated and controlled. This is a concern for ICTD, which strives to consider the instrumental outcomes of technology implementation as it is interwoven throughout peoples lives. Applying Lessigs model of regulation to a cyborg body, we discuss the implications for protecting autonomy in AT use by people with visual impairment.