Clinical Perspectives: Saving Lives through IT

There was a recent announcement by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, on the topic of medication errors. Medication errors are a major problem in the United States, especially in the acute care setting. These errors encompass inaccuracies related to medications for the wrong patients, the wrong periods of time and the wrong doses. People die from these mistakes, and it also falls on all of us in the hundreds of millions of dollars in extra healthcare costs.

The New England Journal of Medicine recently reported a study at Brigham and Women here in Boston that a combination bar code and electronic medication administration recording (eMAR) system had significantly reduced medication errors. Out of almost 7,500 eMAR entries in the study, there was a 41% decrease in non-timing errors, a 51% decrease in potential drug-adverse reactions and a 27% decrease in wrong time occurrences.

Imagine that you are a patient lying in a hospital bed. Don’t you wish your hospital was using the eMAR and bar code system?

Now remember, bar coding eMAR systems are now being considered as a criterion for meaningful use in the Health IT initiative for 2013.