Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.
Turns out that bad handwriting can spell disaster for patients. A druggist in Texas recently misread a doctor's handwritten prescription for a heart pain medication (Isordil) and gave the patient a high blood pressure drug (Plendil) instead. The 42-year-old man took the medication as prescribed and suffered a fatal heart attack. A jury heard the case and ruled that the doctor should pay the family several hundred thousand dollars for their loss.
The Institute of Medicine cites written miscommunication as one of the many errors that account for 44,000 to 98,000 deaths per year. Even the lower estimate makes medical errors the eighth leading cause of death in the country. An estimated 7,000 people per year die from medication errors alone, about 16 percent more deaths than the number attributable to work-related injuries.
Why and How To Encounter ?
One of the reasons is that doctors haven't invested in the needed technology, so it's being provided to them. The $100 million project has drawn support from a variety of partners, including Dell, Google, Aetna and numerous hospitals. "Our goal long-term is to get the prescription pads out of doctors' hands, to get them working on computers," says Scott Wells, a Dell vice-president of marketing. Google is designing a custom search engine with NEPSI to assist doctors looking for health data. Insurance companies such as Aetna have pledged to provide incentives for physicians using e-prescription systems.
Although some doctors have been prescribing electronically for years, many still use pen and paper. This is the first national effort to make a Web-based tool free for all doctors. Tullman says that even though 90% of the country's approximately 550,000 doctors have access to the Internet, fewer than 10% of them have invested the time and money required to begin using electronic medical records or e-prescriptions.
Automation should eliminate many of the errors that occur when pharmacists misunderstand or misrecord medication names or dosages conveyed messily on paper or hurriedly by phone. Given that there are more than 17,000 pharmaceutical brands and generics available, a spoken request for Celebrex, for instance, can be mistaken for Celexa, or a notation requesting 150 milligrams of a drug might be read as 1500. In electronic systems, drugs and dosages are selected from menus to prevent input errors, and pharmacists don't need to re-enter information.
Electronic prescribing could be an on-ramp for physicians beginning to use a full-featured electronic medical records system.
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