(EMAILWIRE.COM, August 21, 2006 ) Rohnert Park, CA -- The medication errors that injure or kill 1.5 million Americans every year can be drastically cut by inexpensive computer systems that physicians can learn to use in a few days, says Dr. David Tully-Smith, a primary care doctor and president of ChartWare Inc. of Rohnert Park, California. “In this computer age it’s deplorable that 80 percent of physicians still scribble notes and file vital information in paper charts,” he says.

The 1.5 million estimate comes in a new study by the prestigious Institute of Medicine in Washington, D.C. It lists a host of problems, such as confusion in drug names, wrong doses, medications given to the wrong patients and illness caused by drugs that react adversely with other drugs patients are taking.

In its recommendations, the panel that oversaw the study emphasized the importance of computerizing the prescribing of drugs and data gathering. Four previous reports from the institute have noted the role this technology will eventually play and “as the information overload gets worse there is really no other solution that is tenable,” according to Dr Kevin Johnson, of Vanderbilt School of Medicine, a panel member.

Tully-Smith agrees. “With computerized record-keeping, the same physicians who prescribe the drug order it directly through the computer. They don’t ask a medical assistant, who may not be familiar with the drug, to try to read their writing and their personal abbreviations and call it in to a pharmacy.

“When pharmacists get one of those hard-to-read handwritten notes they too have to make an educated guess at what it means. Most of the time they guess right. But that’s no consolation to the patient who gets Xanax, a hypnotic drug, instead of Zantac, an H2 blocker for stomach acidity.”

Even if there is no mistake with paper records at the time, future problems often occur when the paper cannot be found. “When a doctor using our computerized system prescribes a drug, it is automatically entered not just into the prescription record but also into a list of medications the patient is taking and the treatment log too. All three can be accessed at any time in the future. That alone radically lowers the chances of a dangerous error when the patient needs further treatment.”

Tully-Smith concedes that, even with a computer, a physician can cause an error by entering incorrect information but even here, he says, there are built-in precautions. “Although many drugs have similar names, that is very rare for drugs in the same class, because manufacturers want to differentiate their product from those of competitors. Our list of drugs is classified by class so there is much less chance of the prescribing doctor choosing the wrong one.”

More fundamentally, he says, with a computer small enough to be held in the hand, the patient’s information is entered during the office visit. “That kind of information is obviously much more reliable than written or dictated notes that are put together and typed up days later.”

Contact:
Dr. David Tully-Smith
Tel: 707 323 2298
dts@chartware.com.

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