Many of our products are designed to reduce medication errors and hospital-acquired infections.
The teaching services saw a decrease in transfers to the intensive care unit, a decrease in medication errors and an increase in discharges to home or rehabilitation.
The quality of that care can be determined through indicators like in-hospital infections, patient falls, medication errors and nurse-to-patient ratios.
At the time, we believed that we were dealing with medication errors and followed all the standard methods for investigating those errors.
An American Hospital Association official, Nancy Foster, said the study highlighted the importance of improving procedures to prevent the medication errors and other problems described in the report.
The "undue risks" in this case are the potential extra exposures to medication errors and other patient safety issues that may occur during hospitalization.
In Michigan, federal investigators found that a nursing home was still open even though it had repeatedly been cited for "poor quality care," poor nutrition services, medication errors and employing people who had been convicted of abusing patients.
For example, 82percentt of those using such electronic records said they improved the quality of clinical decisions, 86 percent said they helped in avoiding medication errors and 85percentt said they improved the delivery of preventative care.
There is little doubt that widespread computerization could greatly reduce the paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals, head off medication errors, and reduce the costly repetition of diagnostic tests as patients move from one doctor to another.
The panel's work, published in the journal Circulation, also called for a mandatory system for reporting medication errors and greater efforts to teach doctors about drugs with names that are confusingly similar.
Many adverse drug events are due to medication errors and are preventable.
