QDIS Blog

I haven’t had time to read the report in its entirety but did want to post some of my thoughts on the main points.

Report finds drug errors hurt 1.5 million - Yahoo! News:

Here’s one quote:

Perhaps the most stunning finding of the report was that, on average, a hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, despite intense efforts to improve hospital care in the six years since the institute began focusing attention on medical mistakes of all kinds.

I must say I thought this was high. I’d like to see this broken down by say size of hospital. Based on a recent experience of having a family member hospitalized in intensive care and then in a regular hospital room, I must say they did a great job. This was at a smaller regional hospital and not in a large major metropolitan area. My guess is that at some of the larger busies hospitals you are going to see an increase in the medication errors. Another interesting stat would be the nurse to patient ratio.

One of the recommendations from the report is to go to all electronic prescriptions by 2010. First, I think this is a great idea, however, I don’t think it will happen. The biggest reason is that most physicians are very busy and many don’t want to learn a new system. This is a major problem; whatever system is used needs to be easy to use and even easier to learn. It should be designed from scratch with the ned use in mind and the goals. Too many times, it is made to be easy to maintain the software or to be easy to be install and not a lot of thought is given into the doctors that will be using the system. Another problem is recruiting tech savvy physicians to test the system, working on it, an then wondering why is doesn’t work when rolled out to a larger audience. This is because in all such testing for use-ability, you need to make sure you have a wide range of abilities in your test group.

I truly think that electronic prescribing is the way to go, but I can’t say I’m confident on how well it will be implemented

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