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Hospitals using expensive technology to reduce
Issue date: 9/13/01 Section: World/Nation
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — At Cooper Hospital in Camden, patients do not have to worry about a misread doctor’s chicken scratch giving them the wrong drug or dose. Prescriptions are typed into a computer.
At the nation’s veterans hospitals, bar code scanners identify the patient’s medicine and also ensure that it won’t cause any harm.
And at Jersey Shore Medical Center in Neptune, a pharmacy robot reads electronic medical charts, pulls bar-coded medicine from stock shelves, makes labels and sorts them into labeled bins, eliminating human error.
Under the microscope after a damning 1999 report about errors killing thousands of patients each year, hospitals across America are testing a wide range of solutions. They are trying everything from better training and new medication-handling procedures to installing sophisticated, multimillion-dollar technology meant to catch mistakes that harried doctors and nurses sometimes miss.
‘‘I think all hospitals are trying to do something to make the use of medication safer,’’ although many still have not laid out the money for pricey, high-tech solutions, said Dr. David Classen, a consultant and hospital internist.
The most complex systems can cost up to $5 million, plus millions more for customizing, staff training and maintenance, said Classen, who works for First Consulting Group of Long Beach, Calif., which helps hospitals choose computerized systems.
Most hospitals making big investments today are focusing on computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems, which can eliminate common causes of confusion: illegible handwriting, drugs with similar names, misinterpreted abbreviations and decimal points that are not noticed, resulting in patients getting an excessive dose.
He estimates that up to 10 percent of U.S. hospitals now have such systems.
Cooper Hospital-University Medical Center in Camden went to a computerized order entry system three years ago, and within two weeks made every doctor, intern and resident stop writing paper orders.
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