1 in 10 patients gets drug error: Study examines six community hospitals in Mass.

The Boston Globe reports:

One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes, according to a report being released today by two nonprofit groups that are urging all hospitals in the state to install a computerized prescription ordering system.

The report is the first large-scale study of preventable prescription errors in community hospitals, and its author, Dr. David Bates of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised that these mistakes were so frequent in these community hospitals. Previous studies in large academic hospitals that also lacked computerized systems found such medication errors occurred less than half as often, he said.

Researchers declined to release the names of the six Massachusetts hospitals, which participated in the $5 million study voluntarily on condition that they would remain unnamed.

Of 73 hospitals in the state, only 10, almost all of them large teaching hospitals in Boston, have adopted the computerized physician order entry system, which requires doctors to type into a central database every medical order, including prescriptions, diagnostic tests, and blood work. The doctors' orders are matched against the patient's medical history, triggering red flags to prevent problems related to drug allergies, overdoses, and dangerous interactions with other drugs.

Great moments in socialized health care.