Tag Archives: Electronic medical records

Trust the Doctor, or Trust the Doctor’s Report Card?

What can be done about the huge medical error fatality problem Dennis Quaid identified when his baby twins were almost killed? Electronic medical records (EMR) are a start. Then as Kent Bottles suggests, let’s use those records to improve physician care:
“Dr. Kim A. Adcock, the radiology chief at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, created a system that misses one-third fewer cancers on mammograms and “has achieved what experts say is nearly as high a level of accuracy as mammography can offer.” At the heart of the program was his willingness to keep score and confront his doctors with their results. He had to fire three radiologists who missed too many cancers, and he had to reassign 8 doctors who were not reading enough films to stay sharp.”
We could use more report cards for physicians, including firing ones with failing grades, and maybe even paying the really good ones more, or at least getting them to teach the others.

-jsq

Dennis Quaid: Medical negligence deaths as many as a major airline crash every day

People think Internet security is bad (it is), but let’s look at medical security:
“Actor Dennis Quaid has become an advocate for electronic medical records. In 2007 his 12 day old twins received a massive accidental overdose (10,000 units of heparin instead of 10 units), a near-fatal error that could have been prevented by the kind of bar code technology that the VA has been using for decades. (Yes, folks, sorry, a government institution was decades ahead of privatized healthcare on this.)”

“Quaid points out that the widely quote 100,000 accidental deaths every year from medical errors equates to a major airline crash every day.”

I point out that that’s three times the annual deaths from automobiles, and around #5 in leading causes of death in the U.S.

-jsq