Hospital patients prone to medication-related problems, study finds

ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - A new study has found that hospital patients suffer a high number of medication-related problems during their stays, even when the hospital uses the latest technology to prevent errors.

In the research released Monday, doctors found 483 "clinically significant" drug-related incidents among 937 patients treated at a veterans' hospital in Utah during a five-month period in 2000. The incidents ranged from mild side effects to death.

Most of the problems - 73 percent - were caused by unforeseen drug reactions and not medical mistakes by the hospital staff.

The study's lead author said the problems occurred despite technological advancements at the VA Medical Center in Salt Lake City, which uses a computerized system for physician ordering, bar-code security system to ensure patients are getting the medications ordered for them and a computer analysis to determine if a new drug will interact poorly with anything else the patient is taking.

Dr. Jonathan Nebeker said such systems are reducing problems, but improvements could be seen with more sophisticated computer programs to analyze drug interactions and warn if any given patient might be prone to a problem.

"We've already plucked the low-hanging fruit, and now we have to climb to the top," Nebeker said.

He said 27 percent of the drug-related problems were caused by medication errors, such as doctors failing to prescribe other drugs to prevent known side effects, failure to monitor patients for complications and improper dosing.

Nebeker, a geriatrician, said doctors have to be open to the technology and support that can help avoid problems caused by medical mistakes. He said it's hard to keep track of all the potential complications.

"Contrary to what they may believe, physicians are human beings and subject to the same limitations as all humans," Nebeker said. "Patients have multiple drugs, they have multiple disease processes and they have changing metabolic states."

He said doctors need to be more vigilant about reactions, and family members can help by asking their physicians if changes in a patient's health might be caused by his or her medications.

The study was published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Previous studies have estimated as many as 770,000 people are injured or die every year in hospitals in medication-related incidents. In Monday's research, the authors note that such problems could cost about $2-billion annually in hospital care.

In Central Florida, Orlando Regional Healthcare is implementing a computerized system for its hospitals that alerts physicians to a patient's allergies and analyze drugs to make sure a new medication won't react badly with the person's other drugs.

All ORH hospitals are expected to have the technology in place within the next year. While no system can prevent all bad drug reactions, the new technology will help, said Dr. Steve Margolis, Orlando Regional's chief medical-informatics officer.

"What you do want to do is prevent the preventable," he said.

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