More "anecdotes" of health IT-related errors - System errors with Victoria's trouble-plagued HIT program caused more than 100 medication mix-ups at two Melbourne hospitals

There are those in the field of health IT who see every health IT-related mishap as an "anecdote" - the "anecdotalists" - and every "positive" study, no matter how weak, as "solid evidence" of the technology's beneficence and efficacy.

See "Anecdotes and Medicine, We are Actually Talking About Two Different Things" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/08/from-senior-clinician-down-under.html for more on the risk management/scientific method confusion it represents, from a clinician Down Under.

More "anecdotes" from Down Under to make the anecdotalists' heads explode:

Computer errors blamed for medication mix-ups
The Age.com (Australia)
October 30, 2013
Kate Hagan

System errors with Victoria's trouble-plagued health technology program have caused more than 100 medication mix-ups at two Melbourne hospitals and need to be fixed urgently, the state's Auditor-General has found.

... Auditor-General John Doyle said problems at three hospitals were putting patients at risk of missing prescribed medications or receiving incorrect doses, in a report tabled in Parliament on Wednesday. 

[Note: the full government audit report is available at http://www.audit.vic.gov.au/reports_and_publications/latest_reports/2013-14/20131030-clinical-ict-systems.aspx in fulltext and PDF.  Other risks besides medication errors were found.  The general problems it reports in the Victoria health IT program were written about here since 2004 and at my Drexel site since 1998 - poor planning and an inadequate understanding of system requirements, underestimated project scope, costs and time lines, as well as underestimations of the required clinical workflow redesign and change management efforts. More on this in a future post.]

Problems included HealthSMART recording patients as having being discharged when they had only moved within the hospital, and difficulties for doctors in recording complex medications in the system.

Mr Doyle said a voluminous medication list meant doctors sometimes [picked whatever was easy -ed.] [and] printed out an incorrect prescription and then changed it manually, resulting in an inaccurate electronic record.  

The doctors likely did this on order to be able to actually see patients and not fiddle with the computer incessantly.

He said incident reports at two hospitals had recorded "more than 100 reported incidents of missed or nearly missed medication, as well as medicines being administered at a higher dose than prescribed".

They included incidents in which "pain relief, antibiotics and other medication were given twice or not at all due to this issue".

That's a good way to injure or kill people.  Trust me, I know - personally.

... He said hospitals had put manual measures in place to mitigate risks but they were not fail-safe, created inefficiencies and did not provide a long-term solution.

Workarounds always introduce new risk.  I also remind that one should never need to work around something that's not in your way.

"As a result, there is continuing potential risk to patient safety that needs to be closely monitored by both [the Victorian Health Department] and the relevant health services," he said.

At least in Australia they state the truth, clearly, as opposed to Americans, who make excuses (see for example my Sept. 16, 2013 post "An Open Letter to David Bates, MD, Chair, ONC FDASIA Health IT Policy Committee on Recommendations Against Premarket Testing and Validation of Health IT" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-open-letter-to-david-bates-md-chair.html).

At least there's this:

Health Minister David Davis said this week that Victoria had "learnt the lessons from the flawed HealthSMART program" and promised that hospitals and health professionals would have more say on future projects, which would be based on sound business cases.

In my view we don't need non-clinician hospital management (including and especially the business computing personnel) to "have more say", we need the health professionals to predominantly have that role.

For those who've never completed medical/nursing school nor completed a medical internship/residency/practice, only the exceptional can comprehend the true complexities of healthcare and health IT to support it [see note 1].  As observed in "Hiding in plain sight: What Koppel et al. tell us about healthcare IT", Nemeth & Cook, Journal of Biomedical Informatics 38 (2005) 262–263 at http://www.wapatientsafety.org/downloads/article-8.pdf:

... On the surface, healthcare work seems to flow smoothly. That is because the clinicians who provide healthcare service make it so. Just beneath the apparently smooth-running operations is a complex, poorly bounded, conflicted, highly variable, uncertain, and high-tempo work domain. The technical work that clinicians perform resolves these complex and conflicting elements into a productive work domain. Occasional visitors to this setting see the smooth surface that clinicians have created and remain unaware of the conflicts that lie beneath it. The technical work that clinicians perform is hiding in plain sight.

Those who know how to do research in this domain can see through the smooth surface and understand its complex and challenging reality. Occasional visitors cannot fathom this demanding work, much less create IT systems to support it.

Unfortunately, the truly exceptional in hospital management are few and far between, despite the Lake Woebegon stories seen about them in their P.R. (See Roy Poses' post "Where No Hospital CEOs are Below Average" at http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2010/07/where-no-hospital-ceos-are-below.html.)

It's becoming clearer the "anecdotalists" were quite wrong about health IT and its propensity to cause or contribute to medical error, especially when done poorly, i.e., is bad health IT which is all too common.  I attribute this to conflict of interest and fairy tale views about IT.

From my teaching site:

Good Health IT ("GHIT") provides a good user experience, enhances cognitive function, puts essential information as effortlessly as possible into the physician’s hands, can be easily, substantively and cost-effectively customized to the needs of medical specialists and subspecialists, keeps eHealth information secure, protects patient privacy and facilitates better practice of medicine and better outcomes.

Bad Health IT ("BHIT") is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, is difficult and/or prohibitively expensive to customize to the needs of different medical specialists and subspecialists, causes cognitive overload, slows rather than facilitates users, lacks appropriate alerts, creates the need for hypervigilance (i.e., towards avoiding IT-related mishaps) that increases stress, is lacking in security, compromises patient privacy or otherwise demonstrates suboptimal design and/or implementation.  

-- SS

[1] A corollary is as seen in a comment By Bruce Landes MD here in what he calls the Landes EHR rule: "The enthusiasm for EHRs increases with the square of the distance from actual medical practice."