Sloppy records kill patients
As a medical malpractice lawyer I pour over medical records nearly everyday. The extraordinarily poor handwriting found in most of these records makes them difficult to read and understand. I have no doubt that many people have suffered malpractice as a result of poor and sloppy record keeping. The move to computers is long overdue
in medicine.s, so why aren't we doing it?"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 error
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