A recent study from the W.P. Carey School of Business reports a large percentage of hospitals across the country have not implemented information technology systems that could prevent life-threatening errors in hospitals.
Assistant professor in the School of Health Management and Policy Michael Furukawa has researched the causes of medical errors in terms of prescription doses and medication and the information technology tools used to prevent these errors in over 4,500 hospitals across the country.
Furukawa and his colleagues — professor Ajay Vinze, associate professor T. S. Raghu and third-year doctoral student and co-author of the study Trent Spaulding — found that IT adoption in hospitals throughout the country has been particularly slow.
“Since 1999, the health care industry has known that medical errors have been a serious problem,” he said. “Information technology like computerized physician order entry, electronic medical records and bar-coding of medications have been shown to reduce medical errors.”
Furukawa said his team began working on their ongoing study about a year ago.
Their study also concluded that on average, only about 2.2 out of eight IT applications were used in the 4,500 hospitals surveyed, and 37 percent of the hospitals used electronic medical records, while only 14 percent used computerized physician order entry.
Furukawa said one of the biggest errors made in hospitals is handwritten prescriptions being written for the wrong dosage, the wrong patient or the wrong type of medication.
He said these errors are very common.
“Using IT systems in hospitals will allow doctors to know whether the patient is allergic to the administered drug and if the dosage is correct,” Furukawa said. “Had they used these applications in the case of actor Dennis Quaid’s twins, the babies may not have been given the adult dosage of a blood-thinning medicine instead of the pediatric dose, which almost killed them.”
Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain have both included IT hospital systems in their budgets for the upcoming presidential election, should they become president. While the government has been interested in promoting the adoption of information technology in hospitals, Furukawa said the adoption process is slow.
“We found a relationship between states that had patient-safety organizations and coalitions, groups that promote IT adoptions within hospitals, and states whose hospitals have already adopted the idea,” he said. “Smaller hospitals, the ones with the least progress in terms of technology, should be the first to receive money for these systems.”
Spaulding said these IT systems have an important impact on healthcare.
“Using patient safety technologies, we can begin to see the effects of Medicare and Medicaid and come up with policy ideas for healthcare to help adopt these systems in hospitals.”
Furukawa said the cost to implement these systems is on average about $10 million per hospital, making funding a big issue as to why hospitals have not adopted these IT systems.
Banner Health, a non-profit hospital organization, uses electronic medical records in 22 of their 23 facilities.
Sharon Bender, project director of care transformation for Banner corporate, said the organization fully automated their systems in 2003 to prevent patient errors.
“We greatly eliminated these errors through automated technologies, as well as improved communication between departments,” she said.
Reach the reporter at allison.carlin@asu.edu.
