Consider the following:
- 9 out of 10 adults have trouble understanding and using everyday health information.
- Low literacy costs the U.S. health system an estimated $106 billion to $238 billion annually.
- Health literacy is a stronger predictor of your health than your age, income, employment status, education level and race.
Those factoids come from the Institute of Medicine, which defines health literacy as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” For patients, that’s more than being able to read a prescription label. It means amassing, analyzing and interpreting health information that may be basic to some, but quite complex to others. Source
Doctors’ sloppy handwriting on prescriptions kill over 7000 people each year
According to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine, doctor’s sloppy handwriting is responsible for over 7000 deaths annually. Additionally, preventable medication mistakes injure more than 1.5 million Americans each year. Many of such errors are result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications. There are over 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the United States each year.
In an effort to thwart this problem, some doctors have started using electronic prescription systems. One of these systems is eRx Now, which is an online tool that can be used to write prescriptions and check for harmful drug interactions. Fewer than 10% of doctors have started using such systems. Source
In Australia, handwriting has been largely eliminated from prescribing. Johanna I. Westbrook, director of the Center for Health Systems and Safety Research at the University of New South Wales, says that about a decade ago, “the government provided financial incentives for family physicians to introduce computers into the practice.” Today, about 90 percent of those practices are computerized, but most pharmacies don’t receive prescriptions electronically. So the provider uses a computer and printer to prepare a neat prescription in paper form that the patient drops off at the pharmacy.
Reducing prescription errors can mean more than eliminating handwriting. Software is needed to integrate prescriptions with a patient’s electronic health record and to check for adverse interactions. This “decision support” software can have its own issues. It must be vigilant in looking for potential problems, but not overzealous. “Decision support is leading to ‘alert fatigue,’ ” Professor Westbrook says. “The consequence is providers ignore the alerts and the system then can’t prevent all of the medication errors that it could.”
On balance, though, it’s clear that e-prescriptions help prevent errors.
Such prescriptions were not unknown even in the 1990s, so clicks have long seemed to be on the verge of replacing scribbles. Perhaps it won’t take another 20 years before the prescription pad is placed next to the jar of leeches as an exhibit in the Museum of Medical Curiosities.
In general, the sloppy handwriting of doctors kills more than 7,000 people annually. Preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually
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