Athens Hospital Making Efforts to Reduce Medication Errors
According to a report from the Institute of Medicine, hospital medication errors injure close to 1.5 million people every year. That’s a lot of mistakes, and many of them will leave patients with serious or even fatal consequences. These errors form the basis of several medical malpractice lawsuits filed in Georgia every year.
In Athens Georgia, St. Mary’s Health Care System has launched a bar-coding system. It's called the Bedside Medication Verification System, and it has cost the hospital close to $1 million. This is how the system works – each patient is given a hospital issued bracelet with a barcode printed on it. The code contains vital information about the patient’s information, including medications and dosage. The drugs in the hospital pharmacy will also have a corresponding barcode labeling. When a nurse visits a patient to dispense medication, she scans the barcode on the patient's identification bracelet, and then scans the medication. A mismatch will lead to a mobile device sounding an alarm, thus dramatically reducing the chances that the patients will be given the wrong dosage or the wrong medication.
St. Mary's has been looking for more developed technology that can reduce the number of hospital deaths linked to medication errors. The staff and the hospital have spent close to a year training for the barcode program, and the rollout which began in December last year has slowly expanded to cover almost the entire hospital. Initial feedback from patients and nurses about the effectiveness of the system has been extremely positive. Using the barcode every time nurses have to give a patient his medication, administer and injection or setup an IV drip takes some time, but hospital staff say it’s worth the effort.
The Bedside Medicine Verification system is being added to hospitals around the country. It ensures that medication management includes all 5 components that make it 100% safe – right patient, right dosage, right route, right time and right medication. Hospital safety advocates estimate that although the numbers of hospitals installing the system are increasing, these are still available at only about 15% of the hospitals in the country. The cost of purchasing and installing the equipment as well as training staff to use it properly is obviously one of the primary concerns. However, it makes more sense that you invest in a system that cuts down on preventable hospital medication errors, instead of having to deal with Georgia medical malpractice lawyers after these errors take place.
