1 in 10 Patients Gets Drug Error

The Boston Globe
February 14, 2008

One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes, according to a report being released today by two nonprofit groups that are urging all hospitals in the state to install a computerized prescription ordering system.  The report is the first large-scale study of preventable prescription errors in community hospitals, and its author, Dr. David Bates of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised that these mistakes were so frequent in these community hospitals.  Previous studies in large academic hospitals that also lacked computerized systems found such medication errors occurred less than half as often, he said.

...Of 73 hospitals in the state, only 10, almost all of them large teaching hospitals in Boston, have adopted the computerized physician order entry system, which requires doctors to type into a central database every medical order, including prescriptions, diagnostic tests, and blood work.  The doctors' orders are matched against the patient's medical history, triggering red flags to prevent problems related to drug allergies, overdoses, and dangerous  interactions with other drugs.

Bates said that after this system was put in place at Brigham and Women's Hospital in 1995, preventable medication errors declined by 55 percent over the next two years.

...Community hospitals in Massachusetts may not  have a choice but to implement such computerized systems, based on increasing pressure from insurers who see the systems enhancing patient safety and saving money.  Gerald  Greeley, director of information services at Winchester Hospital, said Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, over the last year, have demanded the gradual introduction of the computerized physician order entry system as a condition of reimbursement contracts with Winchester Hospital.

"The technology is there - we must adopt it," said Wendy Everett, president of the New England Healthcare Institute, a nonprofit health policy research organization that is one of the two groups releasing the study. 

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