Peer Review of “Automating Individualized Notification of Drug Recalls to Patients: Complex Challenges and Qualitative Evaluation”

Complex Challenges and Qualitative Evaluation." Round 1 Review General CommentsThis manuscript [1] describes interesting and novel work with far-reaching patient safety implications.The authors developed an automated system in the electronic health record (EHR) of an academic medical center that scans for drug recalls, matches up National Drug Codes of recalled medication on a patient's medical list, and sends notifications through the EHR portal to the patient, providing them with more information on the recall.The authors then conducted a qualitative analysis of 9 patients' perceptions of a fictious recall notice.Despite successful development of the automated system, many limitations prevented the widescale adoption of this system in 2 clinics associated with the large academic medical center.The outcome of the work -a decision was made not to deploy the new software for drug recalls-was surprising, and it is important that "failed" implementation work also be published.That said, key weaknesses of the manuscript are the lack of important details, need for better organization of the content, and the need for much stronger scientific and technical writing to accurately interpret the methods, results, and implications.These weaknesses also made it much more difficult to read and evaluate the manuscript.Despite the importance of the topic, the small sample size of patients also limits the work's impact.