A High Dose of Tech
"Some grocery stores have better technology than our hospitals and clinics." Tommy Thompson, secretary of health and human services
All prescription drugs will have to come bar-coded by 2006 under Food and Drug Administration rules, and most likely before then, McClellan said last week, for Medicare patients. To Susan Bumatay, chief nurse at Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch, Calif., that's good news. Sutter currently spends millions of dollars to bar-code uncoded medications because keeping medications straight has become critical, says Bumatay. The number of drugs is burgeoning, and many have names that look or sound similar. More than 17,000 medications are currently marketed in Northern California, and processing 30 million prescriptions a year in Sutter Health's system offers plenty of opportunities for error. "We're human," she says. "That's why we need additional layers of safety." The hospital hasn't used the new system long enough to gauge overall results, says Bumatay, but her staff already can see the near misses that would have resulted without it. "We're dealing with lives here," she says emphatically. "We're not flipping hamburgers."
Digital Medical Records
Bruce Freedman was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1992. Then, in 2001, he had triple coronary artery bypass surgery. He had a mild heart attack last October. And he has kidney problems on top of it all. As the years passed, Freedman, now 62, acquired new doctors with each new ailment. Each one would give him different drugs, and he couldn't keep track of all the instructions and advice.
Then Danny Sands, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, became Freedman's primary-care physician. Sands had spent years developing electronic health records that patients could access at any time from home from a secure website.
It was a radical notion. Thanks to bureaucratic obstacles and physician resistance, patients rarely see their medical records. But Sands believed patients could help manage their own care if they felt more connected to information about their health. Besides, he says, studies show that patients forget 30 percent to 50 percent of what a doctor tells them during an office visit almost as soon as they walk out the door. If patients had their information available at a website, he reasoned, and could E-mail follow-up questions, they would be better informed and ultimately healthier.
So in 2000, Sands launched PatientSite on the Web, intended to contain everything that would go into the usual hospital medical record except for doctors' clinical notes (many doctors weren't comfortable including them and the patients weren't asking for them). Patients now could even see results of lab tests, usually as soon as their physicians got them. And patients could share the information with family members at home. As the site has evolved, Sands has added enhancements--such as the ability to schedule appointments and order refills online for maintenance medications. More than 20,000 patients at Beth Israel currently have access to their health records online, he says.
Freedman, a commercial real-estate broker, especially likes the E-mail feature. Before, he had trouble reaching Sands by phone, or they would play phone tag for days. Now he can fire off a message with a question and usually get an answer within a few hours to a day. "It saves me a lot of aggravation and time and effort," he says.
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