In patients with β-lactam allergies, administration of non–β-lactam surgical prophylaxis is associated with increased risk of infection. Although many patients self-report β-lactam allergies, most are unconfirmed or mislabeled. A quality improvement process, utilizing a structured β-lactam allergy tool, was implemented to improve the utilization of preferred β-lactam surgical prophylaxis.

Letting $p$ vary over all primes and $E$ vary over all elliptic curves over the finite field ${{\mathbb{F}}_{p}}$, we study the frequency to which a given group $G$ arises as a group of points $E\left( {{\mathbb{F}}_{p}} \right)$. It is well known that the only permissible groups are of the form ${{G}_{m,\,k}}\,:=\,\mathbb{Z}\,/m\mathbb{Z}\,\times \,\mathbb{Z}/mk\mathbb{Z}$. Given such a candidate group, we let $M\left( {{G}_{m,\,k}} \right)$ be the frequency to which the group ${{G}_{m,\,k}}$ arises in this way. Previously, C.David and E. Smith determined an asymptotic formula for $M\left( {{G}_{m,\,k}} \right)$ assuming a conjecture about primes in short arithmetic progressions. In this paper, we prove several unconditional bounds for $M\left( {{G}_{m,\,k}} \right)$, pointwise and on average. In particular, we show that $M\left( {{G}_{m,\,k}} \right)$ is bounded above by a constant multiple of the expected quantity when $m\,\le \,{{k}^{A}}$ and that the conjectured asymptotic for $M\left( {{G}_{m,\,k}} \right)$ holds for almost all groups ${{G}_{m,\,k}}$ when $m\,\le \,{{k}^{1/4-\in }}$. We also apply our methods to study the frequency to which a given integer $N$ arises as a group order $\#E\left( {{\mathbb{F}}_{p}} \right)$.

Let K be a number field and r an integer. Given an elliptic curve E, defined over K, we consider the problem of counting the number of degree two prime ideals of K with trace of Frobenius equal to r. Under certain restrictions on K, we show that “on average” the number of such prime ideals with norm less than or equal to x satisfies an asymptotic identity that is in accordance with standard heuristics. This work is related to the classical Lang–Trotter conjecture and extends the work of several authors.

Given an elliptic curve E and a positive integer N, we consider the problem of counting the number of primes p for which the reduction of E modulo p possesses exactly N points over 𝔽p. On average (over a family of elliptic curves), we show bounds that are significantly better than what is trivially obtained by the Hasse bound. Under some additional hypotheses, including a conjecture concerning the short-interval distribution of primes in arithmetic progressions, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the average.

Let K be a fixed number field, assumed to be Galois over ℚ. Let r and f be fixed integers with f positive. Given an elliptic curve E, defined over K, we consider the problem of counting the number of degree f prime ideals of K with trace of Frobenius equal to r. Except in the case f = 2, we show that ‘on average,’ the number of such prime ideals with norm less than or equal to x satisfies an asymptotic identity that is in accordance with standard heuristics. This work is related to the classical Lang–Trotter conjecture and extends the work of several authors.