About medical error

About Patient Safety

One of the greatest challenges that will face healthcare providers over the next 10 years will be the protection of patients from medical errors and delays that are at the core of the Obama administration mandated meaningful use criteria. Included in these considerations are the elimination of adverse drug events that kill as many as 300,000 patients every year in American hospitals.

Medical error – the impact on patient safety

To illustrate the extent of the patient safety issue, it has been estimated that in the United States approximately hundreds of thousands of patients are victims of serious errors while in hospital. Some studies have shown that up to one million medical errors occur in hospitals in every year. Of these, 50% are very serious, resulting in what are known as adverse events or adverse drug events (ADEs), and 20% are potentially fatal.

While the accuracy of these figures is open to some discussion, as one leading medical practitioner has stated, “Whatever the figure, any death is one death too many”.

Medical error – the impact on costs

Quite apart from the issue of patient safety, medical error places an enormous financial burden on the community. In the US, the average cost of errors arising from such factors as additional hospital admissions and re-admissions, increased length of stay, inappropriate use of drugs and duplication of treatment, has been calculated as close to $ 10,0000 - a total annual cost of US$10, billion nationally (some studies have actually put forward figures that are as high as 100, billion). It is though that in Massachusetts as much as one third of all hospital cost can be attributed to ADEs and readmission to correct previous errors.

It is important to note that these costs do not include the potential cost to hospitals of litigation as the result of negligence or malpractice. The cost of litigation, plus associated increases in medical insurance premium can be expected to be a substantial contributor to healthcare costs.

The CPOE solution

In North America and Europe, a new generation of computer systems, generally known as "Computer Physician Order Entry" or CPOE Systems is being promoted to combat the problem of medical error, and is proving to have dramatic success.

For more information on CPOE, click here.
For information on the VisualMED CPOE System, click here.