Study Says E-prescription Systems Would Save At Least 50k Lives a Year

First time accepted submitter shirleylopez1177 writes "Approximately 50,000–100,000 people die in America because of preventable adverse events (PAE). These PAEs or medical errors are among the leading causes of death, ranking higher than breast cancer, AIDS and motor vehicle accidents in terms of the number of fatalities caused. As a response to the problem of medication errors, e-prescription systems have emerged. Few studies have looked at how e-prescribing systems compare to traditional systems in their potential to reduce medical errors. However, a study from Australia published two weeks ago in PLoS Medicine examined the impact of e-prescription systems on medication errors in the inpatient setting and demonstrated that these systems are indeed effective."

Re:10 years ago...

[SteelKidney]

I expect that reading the Daily WTF ought to answer your question. Or Diebold's attempts to use whatever legal maneuvers they could in order to cover up the fact that they were selling extremely poor-quality software. Or the fact that Sony got so thoroughly and completely pwned over the past couple of years that it's not unreasonable to assume that anything more complicated than "Hello World" written by a Sony team is yet another hack waiting to happen.

The begin of the article misleads...

[Troyusrex]

by implying that drug errors are causing 50,000 to 100,00 deaths a year when, in fact, drug issues are a very small portion preventable adverse events (PAE). Things like falls and catheter infections are far more common. The article mentions that drug allergies and cross drug reactions are already extremely low and unaffected by implementing e-prescription (probably because the computers in the pharmacy already alert to this). The only thing effected are illegible prescriptions. I think e-prescriptions are a fine idea but this article is misleading as to how much benefit it would have in terms of lives saved.

Before Windows Vista there was...

[tepples]

maybe we should build a F/LOSS platform for this so that it can be widely audited and its quality can be more transparently verified

Can you code in MUMPS [wikipedia.org]?