aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Technology’s not the answer
Medical errors kill nearly 100,000 American each year, with lethal drug interactions accounting for most of these deaths. Computerization—which hospitals have been slow to embrace—was supposed to eliminate most problems, but new research published Wednesday indicates that even the best computer system can’t save you from a doctor’s catastrophic screw-up.
Harmful medication-related mishaps cropped up in a quarter of all patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salt Lake City, one of the most high-tech hospitals in the country, according to a study published in Archives of Internal Medicine...Even though the hospital’s computers were supposed to protect against dangerous drug interactions, illegible prescriptions and bedside mix-ups, nine of the 937 patients studied died as a result of medication problems, the study found.
So does the solution have anything to do with training health professionals? They don’t think so:
The challenge instead, medical specialists say, is making the technology assist doctors in more ways than just sounding an alarm when penicillin is ordered for someone who’s allergic to it.
What if an unintended consequence is that doctors get sloppier because they assume the technology will catch their errors?
