Agreed. There are way too many preventable errors that happen daily. With so many internal checks and the electronic medical record, it boggles my mind how this still happens. I do not think that most of these are intentional and I'm curious about which kinds of errors are the most common. Pardon my ignorance since I have not read the article.

If you think about it though how many interactions happen between a provider and a patient daily. doc talks to the patient. nurse talks to the patient. doc enters orders. nurse reviews. pharmacy reviews. nurse dispenses. That's 6 off the top of my head for one patient for one medication. This is a very conservative rough rough rough intentional estimate. If we take that as a starting point for one department who sees 100k patients per year... 600k opportunities for an error to occur. It's terrible but not surprising that so many errors occur. Healthcare is not in the business of killing patients and errors are taken extremely seriously.

I've been on an email chain for the past 5 days because the clerk told a family member over the phone the clinical status of a loved one when they shouldn't have and it went up the chain.

To summarize.... yes we have a problem with errors. Thousands of people are working on it daily. How to fix it systemically is the trillion dollar question. Your well thought out ideas would be greatly appreciated.

~your humble imperfect toxdocx