Source: Cause of Death: Sloppy Doctors -- Monday, Jan. 15, 2007 -- Page 1 -- TIME
Highlights:
Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually......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... 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."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...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...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."
