July 10th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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About 10% of computer-generated prescriptions included at least one error, of which a third had potential for harm, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
This errors rate matched that of handwritten prescriptions, deflating at least one reason for the federal government’s incentives to switch providers to e-prescribing. The government had provided incentives for switching to e-prescribing; those turned to penalties for not doing so on July 30.
Researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study of 3,850 e-prescriptions received by a commercial outpatient pharmacy chain across three states over four weeks in 2008. A panel reviewed them for medication errors, potential adverse drug events, and rate of prescribing errors by type and by prescribing system. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
June 12th, 2011 by DrWes in Humor
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It happens to every doctor at some time in their busy career: the missing pager. Usually, discovering the locale of the digital disrupter is quite simple: you simply page yourself provided, of course, that the contraption is not on “vibrate” mode.
And so it was with me some time ago.
The scene was a familiar one: rushing off to work, heading out the door while contemplating the upcoming caseload of the day with my mind wandering off to great medical thoughts when, suddenly, I reached to my hip to find that I had forgotten my pager.
Dang.
So back to the house I go and scramble for the telephone. My wife, hearing the door opening calls back from upstairs: “Something wrong, dear?”
“No, just forgot my *@#$&#*& pager. No biggie.”
So I called the paging number and waited. (Why it takes so long for electrons to travel to space and back is beyond me.) Some time later I heard in the distance: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*
May 23rd, 2011 by Michael Kirsch, M.D. in True Stories
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Photo Credit
I barely escaped from an embarrassing situation recently in the hospital. I was consulted to place a feeding tube, called a PEG, in an ICU patient. We gastroenterologists are rarely consulted for our opinion on whether these tubes make sense, which they often don’t. We are recruited to these patients simply to perform the technical function of inserting the tubes, so that Granny, or Great-Granny, or Great-Great… , won’t starve. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated that providing this nutrition to individuals with advanced dementia doesn’t benefit them. In addition, while it may seem intuitive that artificial feeding provides comfort, this may not be the case. It may provide more comfort to the physicians and family than it does to the patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at MD Whistleblower*
April 17th, 2011 by Linda Burke-Galloway, M.D. in True Stories
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Olympic winner and motivational speaker, Jim Stovall once said “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.” In September 2009, I wrote about a blog about Carolyn Savage, a 40 year old woman with a poor obstetrical history. Savage married her college sweetheart and had an uncomplicated first pregnancy. However, her second child was born prematurely. She had 4 subsequent miscarriages and ten years later she became pregnant through in-vitro fertilization (IVF). Because the Savages wanted a large family, they tried IVF again. Unfortunately, Savage was impregnated with the wrong embryo. To their credit, everyone rose to the highest level of integrity. The infertility clinic informed the Savage family as soon as the mistake was discovered and then gave them the option of terminating the pregnancy or continuing it. The Savage family then had to inform the rightful parents of the embryo that were not expecting to have a baby any time soon but was now faced with that dilemma. Savage ultimately delivered the baby and then handed it over to its rightful parent, the Morrell family. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Linda Burke-Galloway*
March 26th, 2011 by Shadowfax in Opinion, True Stories
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Bongi is an amazing writer, and if you haven’t, I strongly urge you to read his latest post, titled “The Graveyard.”
I imagine that a huge number of doctors know exactly what he means. I remember being told by a surgeon, while I was in medical school, that “you’re not a real doctor until you’ve killed someone.” I thought at the time (and still think) that there was a puerile bravado behind that admonition, but there is also a grain of truth. I have my own graveyard. Curiously, not all of its inhabitants are dead. They are the cases where I screwed up, or, charitably, cases that went bad where I feel that maybe I could’ve/should’ve done things differently.
The missed SAH
The missed DVT/PE
The missed AAA
The missed Aortic dissection
The missed MI
I remember them all, clearly and in detail. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Movin' Meat*
