DMC Using Computers to Verify Meds

The halls of Children's Hospital are now lined with computers, eliminating the need for paper and hopefully mistakes.

Zachary spends a lot of time at the hospital and takes a lot of medication. Now, making sure Zach and patients just like him are getting the right medicine has gone to a high tech level at the DMC. The days of deciphering a doctor's handwriting are over.

"So, what would happen is doctors might write something that couldn't be read. Pharmacists might read something wrong. They may deliver a drug up to a floor and then a nurse may take several drugs into the room and give it to the wrong patient or give it at the wrong time because it's in that patient's basket. Those kind of errors happen all over the country all the time still," said DMC Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Leland Babitch.

Rolling computer stations at hospitals throughout the DMC give doctors and nurses all the information they need all the time. Vital signs, nursing notes and, most importantly, doctor's orders.

"I put my orders into the computer. I have no problems with legibility. The pharmacy verifies it in the computer. It goes into the nurse's queue and when she gives the medication, she scans that patient, she scans the drug so that we're sure we're giving the right dose of the right medication to the right patient via the right route at the right time. So, it really adds to patient safety," Babitch said.

It was actor Dennis Quaid who put a celebrity face on the real risk of medical mistakes. His newborn twins nearly died because they were given a drug overdose. It's these kinds of mistakes that kill an estimated 100,000 patients a year.

"It's scary in some ways to say that we have those errors in hospitals, but it's the truth. We've shown since we've instituted this kind of electronic process that we've reduced our error rates of those things by sixty, seventy, eighty percent and we're really driving towards zero," said Babitch.