I must be psychic

So, yesterday I wrote a bit of a rant regarding stupid people I work with, and how they are literally dangerous people.

Check out this news story I just saw on Yahoo News..

WASHINGTON - More than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by drug errors in hospitals, nursing homes and doctor's offices, a count that doesn't even estimate patients' own medication mix-ups, says a report that calls for major steps to increase patient safety.

Topping that list: All prescriptions should be written electronically by 2010, the Institute of Medicine said. At least a quarter of all medication-related injuries are preventable, the institute concluded in the report it released Thursday.

Perhaps the most stunning finding of the report was that, on average, a hospitalized patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, despite intense efforts to improve hospital care in the six years since the institute began focusing attention on medical mistakes of all kinds.

The new probe couldn't say how many victims of drug errors die. A 1999 estimate put the number of deaths, conservatively, at 7,000 a year. Also unknown is how many of the injuries are serious.

But a preventable drug error can add more than $5,800 to the hospital bill of a single patient. Assuming that hospitals commit 400,000 preventable drug errors each year, that's $3.5 billion — not counting lost productivity and other costs — from hospitals alone, the report concluded.

Not many people know that when you go into the hospital, there is a fairly good chance you'll get medicated incorrectly, and there is more than an insignificant chance of death resulting from it.

Make sure you have people you can trust (who aren't complete dumbasses) verifying your meds for you, and question the hospital staff if need be. If you do it nicely, they shouldn't get pissed off about it.

The reason the VA has a much better system is because it's actually more technologically advanced than most private sector hospitals. Now, I work only on the Surgical system, but I have some friends that worked on the BCMA project - which is a bar code med application for the VA's pharmacies, both for inpatient and outpatient. Many of the VA hospitals have robotic systems that count out and dispense the drugs.. It's really neat to watch.. it spits out a bottle with a certain number of a particular drug, and a label, and the pharmacists eyeballs it to double check, slaps the label on it, and away it goes. That solves the problem of a tired pharmacist grabbing the wrong bottle off a shelf.

For inpatient meds, all the doctors orders are written electronically and everything is assigned a bar code.. the entire process is verified in each step through swiping a barcode and seeing that it matches up to the electronic record. It's not a perfect system because it does depend on people to actually use the bar code reader and look at the results to make sure there is no mix up, but it does drastically reduce errors that kill people.

Stupid people did not design and build that system, but I can tell you there were a lot of stupid moments from a lot of stupid people who tried to get involved. Half the battle for an engineer is to figure out how to make something work flawlessly. The other half is to figure out how to defeat the aspirations of the stupid people.

Oh.. btw.. after many emails on the topic I wrote about yesterday, this morning one of the combative people wrote;

Agree. There are changes that did occur within the surgery package - requiring new data fields AND requiring the creation of a PCE entry on all closed surgical cases.

Which, of course, is what I was saying all along.. and now she states it like a fact, as if she is the authoritative source behind that information, and as if she is giving us her blessing to move forward.

That particular person is well known to me to be a complete moron. The reason people like that survive in the system is because they become viewed as subject matter experts by other stupid people. Then that view becomes the "conventional wisdom" about a person, and soon it's a well known fact that that person is a subject matter expert, while the engineers know that they are complete morons. I'm not kidding. And, as an engineer, you cannot call out that person as a moron because when you do that, you are essentially calling everyone else a moron as well by extension.

That make me insane, but while some people are not very good at reason, they are good at covering their asses.

So anyway.. the short of it.. make sure to double check every med that somebody gets in a hospital. Stupid people can kill you.