Imagine that a health care practitioner is about to begin an encounter with a patient. The practitioner accesses a list of current complaints along with the patient’s electronic health record. Much of that record was acquired and encoded by intelligent interviewing software prior to the patient’s visit.

Continue reading " Graceful Degradation "

Problem: Many medication errors are hard to detect, but some that occur during the prescribing phase can be especially elusive and can lead to controversy as to whether they are truly errors or acceptable differences in professional judgement. For example, when a nurse fails to administer a drug as prescribed or a pharmacist fails to [...]

Continue reading " Medication Error or Professional Judgement "

I took a deep breath and composed myself before entering the hospital room. I was a third-year medical student and preparing myself to deliver bad news. I was well aware that I had never done this before. He had a resident, an attending physician, and a lung specialist all caring for him, but I was [...]

Continue reading " An Invaluable $4 Gift "

The following letter was written in response to the article by Dr. Thomas Marzili, entitled “What’s Going to Happen to Brave Surgeons and Patients?”
Dear Dr. Marzili, I just read your essay in the April Pharmacy and Therapeutics. I enjoyed the article. As a surgeon who is often asked to take on such difficult cases, I [...]

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The key unanswered question about the proposed rule by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which would require bar codes to be placed on drugs that are sold to hospitals, has nothing to do with the pharmaceutical industry. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: “It’s the hospitals, stupid!” Pharmaceutical manufacturers can add bar codes to their products [...]

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Realizing that health care prokviders must gather information, analyze it, and share the results with others in order to learn from medical errors, the House of Representatives passed the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (H.R.663). The Act encourages providers to conduct research and gather data about the causes of medical mishaps and then share [...]

Continue reading " Providers to Share Data About Causes of Medical Errors "

By now, most P&T readers are familiar with the clinical efficacy of the low-molecular-weight (LMW) heparins. Indeed, these new compounds are being prescribed in many settings—from acute coronary syndrome to the prevention and therapy of deep venous thrombosis (DVT). LMW heparins are being given in the outpatient setting through supervised programs coupled with intensive patient [...]

Continue reading " The Paradox of Low-Molecular-Weight Heparins "