A high percentage of medical errors, committed because of physician's lack of experience, huge volume of data to be analyzed, and inaccessibility to medical records of previous patients, can be reduced using computer-aided techniques.
These findings may be due to higher physician workload and greater patient complexity increasing demands on limited physician resources, taxing working memory and increasing cognitive load, thereby increasing the likelihood of physician errors, including errors in billing diagnosis.
Nurses were more hesitant to admit and report errors; only 55% of physicians and 44% of nurses endorsed this statement (χ=4.9, p=0.02).
Although recall of a medical contact was good, there were systematic errors in the reported frequency of physician visits (under-reported) and hospital nights (over-reported).
Five studies involved nurses and medical staff [ 34, 39, 40, 77, 78] and eight studies obtained error data from various grades of physician responsible for administering anaesthetics [ 68– 75, 75, 81, 86].
Though a co-author on these studies, Sobel himself has remarked that the use of self-reported recall of physician diagnoses "multiplies errors", and that other studies are subject to selection bias in the form of women self-selecting to become patients [ 4].
Practice-based audit, and feedback to help physician detect the errors of their practices, as well as fundamental educational efforts are of critical importance in overcoming this gap.
A company that provides health insurance to state government employees and retirees has agreed to correct errors in its directory of physicians and reimburse policyholders for improper bills as part of a settlement with the attorney general's office, state officials announced yesterday.
They speculate that their CPOE's connection to serious errors is a "result of physicians choosing the wrong drug template, selecting from multiple options, or as a consequence of constructing their own drug prescriptions using pull down menus".
Computerised checks for errors, physician reviews of submitted data and on-site audits of participating centers ensure data quality.
