Cause of Death: Sloppy Handwriting
from Time
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, 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.
Although some doctors have been prescribing electronically for years, many still use pen and paper. This is the first national effort to make a Web-based tool free for all doctors. 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. Automation should eliminate many of the errors that occur when pharmacists misunderstand or misrecord medication names or dosages conveyed messily on paper or hurriedly by phone.
1 comment:
Among the hospitals that call me in to prevent medication errors (by
giving handwriting classes to the doctors), a fairly high percentage
claim to have "computerized everything" 1 or 2 or 5 or more years ago
… yet they still have handwriting problems, because of a crucial 1% to 5% of handwritten documentation that just won't go away.
Doctors in "totally computerized" hospitals still scribble Post-Its to
slap onto the walls of the nurse's station, still scrawl notes on the
cuffs of their scrubs during impromptu elevator/corridor conferences
with colleagues … and, most of all, doctors with computer systems
often have the ward clerks operate the computers, use the Net, or
whatever: working, of course, from the doctors' illegible handwriting.
Bad doctor handwriting, incorrectly deciphered by ward clerks using the computer for any purpose, thereby enters the computerized medical record.
And what happens when disasters knock out a hospital's network? More than one hospital, during Hurricane Katrina, lost its generator, its electric power — and therefore its computer system — for the duration.
Even the computer-savviest staffers in the disaster zone had to use pens. Let's hope they wrote legibly.
Kate Gladstone - Handwriting Repair - http://learn.to/handwrite
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