Few users are more mobile, and juggle more information than clinicians. On average a clinician sees one patient every seven to nine minutes, with about two minutes travel between patients and for every ten patients he sees, anywhere from one to five questions arise which require further information (British Medical Journal, August 1999). Clinicians’ 24/7 access to information is absolutely essential to the quality of care they provide.
In 2000, a report stunned the medical community. It showed that medical errors are one of the nation’s (US) leading causes of death and injury. The report, To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, estimated that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals each year as the result of medical errors. This means that more people die from medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS.
To compound this fact, errors in health care have been estimated to cost more than $5 million per year in a large teaching hospital, and preventable healthcare-related errors cost the economy from $17 to $29 billion each year (Translating Research into Practice. Reducing Errors in Health Care). An editorial in the BMJ extrapolates from a pilot UK study which showed that in England and Wales adverse events lead to an extra three million bed days at a minimum cost of £1bn per year (BMJ 2001)). The good news is that many medical errors are preventable. For example, research suggests that over half of all adverse drug reactions are preventable through alerting systems, controls on administration and ordering.
Continue reading ‘ICT can help reduce medical errors, save lives’
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