Explosion of Potential Medical Malpractice Claims: 1.5 Million Medication Errors In U.S. Hospitals Per Year
Medical malpractice comes in all forms, including prescription errors. A new report from the Institute of Medicine found that, conservatively, there are 1.5 million medication errors each year including giving the wrong dose, giving medication to the wrong patient, and misreading labels and prescriptions. That amounts to one error per patient per day during hospital visits. These numbers do not include errors in the doctor’s office or patient errors at home.
Most errors do not result in injury, but the report cited a previous study that estimated 7,000 deaths per year due to medication errors. One high-profile case, also cited in the study, was that of Betsy Lehman who was a Boston Globe health reporter. She died in 1993 when her doctor mistakenly gave her four times her recommended chemotherapy dose during breast cancer treatment.
These mistakes lead to financial loss as well as health risks for patients as well. Serious injuries can add $5,800 per patient to the hospital bill, or $3.5 billion nationwide based on 400,000 “preventable” errors.
So what is being done to ensure these mistakes don’t happen? The answer is everything - and nothing. There are already ways of ensuring the right patient gets the right dose of the right medication, but the vast majority of hospitals do not use these systems. For example there are computer systems that can be used to manage patient medication in the hectic and high-volume hospital environment. This eliminates dose miscalculations and the need to “decipher” handwriting, which are often sources of errors. But only 6% of hospitals have such as system in place.
Another prevention method is bar coding of patient wristbands and medication doses. This way, nurses can confirm the medication with the patient before administering the dosage to further reduce errors. An author of the study noted that at one hospital using the bar code system, there were 74 incidents in a one-month period where the computer alerted nurses that they were about to give the wrong medication to the wrong patient. However, less than 15% of hospitals use any type of bar coding.
In fact many hospitals still do not use Electronic Medical Records (EMR), relying on error-prone paper based records instead. This is the first step to computerizing medication management to reduce the number of errors - and medical malpractice claims. Hospitals state that switching to EMR and other computerized systems is complex and takes time. But in this day and age when even grandmothers use computers on a daily basis, how long can hospitals delay before they are seen to be negligent?
Medication errors can lead to severe injuries, even death. If you feel that you have been needlessly injured due to misread labels and other prescription errors, call Florida personal injury lawyer David I. Fuchs at 800-570-2858 for a free consultation.