US doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 each year

Danny Tse

From this 2007 Time magazine article

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.

To address the problem—and give the push for electronic medical records a shove—a coalition of health care companies and technology firms will launch a program Tuesday to enable all doctors in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. The National e-prescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) will offer doctors access to eRx Now, a Web-based tool that physicians can use to write prescriptions electronically, check for potentially harmful drug interactions and ensure that pharmacies provide appropriate medications and dosages. "Thousands of people are dying, and we've been talking about this problem for ages," says Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a Chicago-based health care technology company, that initiated the project. "This is crazy. We have the technology today to prevent these errors, so why aren't we doing it?"

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.

By providing doctors with free tools and support—and perhaps a little prodding from the big insurers who pay the bills—the NEPSI alliance hopes to encourage a quickening in adoption of electronic prescribing. Because the new program is Web-based, no special software or hardware is required, and NEPSI says the new system takes 15 minutes to learn. Sprint plans to give away 1,000 web-enabled phones to be used to transmit e-prescriptions and to demonstrate the technology's ease of use. To keep pharmacies plugged into the new system, SureScripts, which links pharmacies around the country much like the national ATM network connects banks, will handle the e-prescriptions traffic from doctors to the country's 55,000 pharmacies.

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.

SureScripts CEO Kevin Hutchinson says one key to reducing medication errors is to get the most prolific prescribers to transition to electronic processing. "Not a lot of people understand that 15% of physicians in the U.S. write 50% of the prescription volume," Hutchinson says. "And 30% of them write 80%. So it's not about getting 100% of physicians to e-prescribe. It's about getting those key 30% who prescribe the most. Then you've automated the process."

Wider adoption of e-prescribing could lead to further efficiency in medical record keeping, which many believe is vital to both improving health care delivery and lowering costs. "Electronic prescribing could be an on-ramp for physicians beginning to use a full-featured electronic medical records system," Hutchinson says. "That's the holy grail."

SivaNevets

no surprise for me. one of my friend is taking pharmacy program, and hes been taught "NEVER ask if u cant read doctors prescription, it will lower us".

and i guess doctors also been taught "NEVER write neat, it will lower us.

bobman1235

Luckily for all of us this is going the way of the dodo, as more and more medication orders and chart notes are going digital. Every prescription I"ve gotten in the past several years has been done using one of those fancy PDA things that sends the prescription digitally directly to the pharmacy of your choice.

Systems

SivaNevets wrote: »

no surprise for me. one of my friend is taking pharmacy program, and hes been taught "NEVER ask if u cant read doctors prescription, it will lower us".

What the hell is that suppose to mean....it will lower us. I suggest you tell your friend to leave that program...

SivaNevets

Lorthos wrote: »

What the hell is that suppose to mean....it will lower us. I suggest you tell your friend to leave that program...

thats wut he has been taught. because pharmacy in contemporary society is an overpaid service industry.

"because that thing will lower us" - from kill bill.

all im saying its not just the doctors fault. i heard in some states in US r already start to use automatic pharmacy service.

cfrizz

Pretty much everything is entered into a computer with Harvard Vanguard & has been for years. All prescriptions are entered, lab tests the works. I can go to any HV office & get my blood drawn, & pick up my meds. They just look me up in the computer to see what's needed.

mmadden28

I'll bet that technology and security are a big part involved in the delay of acceptance. Think about it--some cracker kiddie scripter takes advantage of a vulnerability on the site and you got prescriptions being written willie nillie.

I think these days though technology has matured enough and become open enough, and software developers and big companies are finally much more security coscious then even a few years ago, that the powers that be are comfortable with it. I'm sure not the only reasons, but I'm sure big factors. Personal information protection also plays a big role.

I would imagine its now more possible also because lots of comapnies started thier own initiatives to streamline processes, make them more secure and more accurate. Now its not so much of a big leaps for others. Tried and true methods.




After all look how long it took for the general population to do online banking or buy stuff on the internet. I know many people who still don't trust the system enough to do any of that.

mmadden28

Keiko wrote: »

... "have aviated intercourse with an oscillating pastry." ...

AudioGenics

very sad.
terrible for all the victims of medical malpractice.

John30_30

Keiko wrote: »

Translated: Take a flying @#$% through a rolling donut.

A rolling donut gathers no fixated lichens.