Medication Systems and Safety: What's Broken and How Can We Fix it Together? - Online Course

In this webinar, interdisciplinary colleagues will discuss how data-driven, collaborative approaches are needed to solve long-standing medication safety problems, focusing on issues with people, processes, and technology. The speakers will give examples from their interdisciplinary work and offer suggestions for advancing safety through nursing practice, nursing education, and nursing research.

This course will retire after 26th February 2027.

Learning Outcomes:
After participating in this course, learners will be able to:

• Recognize why medication safety remains a critical problem.
• Discuss an example of using data to understand a medication safety problem and how it might best be solved.
• Explain why medication safety improvement depends on multidisciplinary approaches and systems thinking.

Speaker Bios:

Nikki S. Polis, PhD, RN
Nikki Polis is a registered nurse. Currently, she is the chief nurse executive and senior vice president for Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare in Memphis, TN, a position she's held since 2012. Previously, Dr. Polis was a system director at Main Line Health System in Pennsylvania and site administrator at MacDonald Women's Hospital in Ohio. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Kentucky, a master's degree from The Ohio State University and a PhD from Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Polis is a member of the Autonomous Pharmacy Advisory Board and participates on the research and self-assessment workstreams and serves on the Nominations Committee.

Allen Flynn, PHarmD, PhD
Following his graduation as a Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Michigan in 1993, Allen Flynn worked as a network analyst until the dot-com bubble burst. Only then did he start practicing as a hospital pharmacist. Building on his combined interests, Allen was promoted to Coordinator and became involved with several major health IT initiatives. For more than 8 years he held health system roles of increasing responsibility while gaining expertise in electronic health records and medication system safety. This real-world experience inspired Allen to dedicate the rest of his career to eliminating preventable medication harm. Between 2012 and 2018, he completed a doctorate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Since that time, Allen has taught health informatics and pursued a wide variety of research projects to improve the safety of medication use systems and software.