A medical error: it's a nightmare scenario that no physician or medical practice wants to face. While most healthcare professionals and a majority of consumers/clients/patients realize that doctors are human beings and sometimes make mistakes, most take measures to ensure accuracy in all aspects of a patient care scenario.
Unfortunately, thousands of people do experience some form of medical errors and even preventable deaths on an annual basis. According to a recent study performed by Johns Hopkins, medical errors are now ranked as the third contributing cause of death in the United States. Alarmingly, based on data accumulated during the eight year study, medical errors contribute to approximately 250,000 deaths annually.
Another study by the CDC emphasized that adverse drug events alone cost over $3 billion a year. As of 2014, adverse drug events were the sixth leading cause of death on a national basis.
The focus for today is catching potential errors before they happen, especially medication errors that can be prevented through medication reconciliation.
Today's EHR systems support automated artificial intelligence, sometimes sifting through massive patient care files. Not long ago, a patient with a chronic condition might have a paper record composed of hundreds of pages. Today, an EHR system can quickly sift through data to analyze current and past prescriptions, laboratory tests, treatment plans, diagnoses, medical procedures, and even foods that a patient should stay away from when taking certain medications prior to or following a medical treatment or procedure.
These statistics emphasize that the majority of such medical errors are not implied to be caused by lack of concern, inattentiveness, or outright malfeasance on the part of physicians, but rather the often confusing lack of communication and access to complete medical records and histories.
Development of electronic health record/electronic medical record technologies can serve to reduce medical errors through more coordinated care enhanced by data sharing and immediate accessibility by any member of a patient's health care team.
EHR technologies can help prevent medical errors by flagging potential drug interactions and/or adverse reactions. The majority of drug prescription errors are caused by:
- Prescription of drugs that interact with other drugs (prescription or over-the-counter)
- Common foods that a patient may consume while taking a particular medication
- Prescribing a drug to a patient who is allergic or who has experienced an adverse reaction to it
- Failure to fully recognize and consider potentially dangerous side effects based on a specific patient's medical history
- Incorrect dosage or recommendations for frequency of dosage
A number of features integrated into EHR systems today can trigger alerts for drug/food or drug/drug interactions, as well as double check for allergies or previous documentation of adverse reactions to a drug.
EHR database features can also aid physicians or other care team members to quickly research any drug, its side effects, and/or contraindications. Such systems often provide formularies for approved and standard dosage and administration of specific drugs.
Recent data suggests that reconciliation tools and options in EHR systems can reduce medication errors by over 50%. Some of these systems used by hospitals take advantage of split screens that list pre-admission medications and compare them for potential interactions or dangerous adverse reactions with potentially new medications that may be prescribed for a current treatment or procedure.
Reducing overlap with testing procedures and missing lab results
Repetitive testing procedures not only threaten reimbursement rates, they can cause confusion resulting in patients missing vital tests. Missing lab results are also of major concern to physicians. An EHR system is capable of tracking consultations, tests, referrals, and lab results that help reduce medical errors in this regard. EHR software can alert to pending and completed lab tests and specify whether or not results fell within normal ranges, ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks.
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