True Stories #428 - Just What the Doctor Ordered

Medical paperwork glitches can be dangerous, even deadly. What's happening, and how can it be fixed?

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-stories-with-seth-andrews--5621867/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Seth Andrews, and what you're about to hear is
a true story. Before I begin today, I want to
make something absolutely clear. I have tremendous respect and admiration
for those in the medical profession, and I'm a firm

(00:23):
believer that the science and scientists of medicine are so
often the true miracle workers among us. I am in
awe of technological advances in medicine. I'm in awe of
those who finished the long gauntlet of education and training
to be there for us when we become sick and injured.
So today is not a commentary on the merits of medicine.

(00:48):
It is just an admission that we are all human,
we can all make mistakes, and even among doctors, mistakes
can be costly. Back in two thousand and six, a
report it was published by the National Academies of Science
Institute of Medicine, and it revealed something really alarming. Medical

(01:09):
paperwork was being imperfectly filled out and preventable medication mistakes
were responsible for one and a half million patient injuries
and seven thousand deaths a year from bad paper work,
according to the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. Not only

(01:29):
do the issues potentially harm people, but they result in
more than one hundred and fifty million calls from doctors'
offices and hospitals to patients, pharmacists to physicians and physicians
to pharmacists, insurance companies to doctors to patients to pharmacists, etc.
Experts say that up to twenty five percent of medication

(01:53):
errors can be traced back to a single glitch in
the system, one glitch costing the healthcare industry billions of
dollars a year. In nineteen ninety nine, a Texas jury
awarded a woman four hundred and fifty thousand dollars after
her husband suffered a fatal heart attack from taking the
wrong medication. The pharmacist had seen Plendil on the sheet.

(02:18):
Plendil is a drug for high blood pressure, but the
drug was supposed to be iSER Dil, which is for
low blood pressure, and the man's heart failed. Some people
believe the widow could have gotten much more money in
court if she'd just gone for a higher number. After all,
her husband had trusted the doctors and the system, and

(02:38):
the jury felt convinced it was human error that caused
an unnecessary death. But was it an error after all?
The mistake may not have been a mistake. The issue
estimated to cause one point five million injuries and seven
thousand deaths a year. That is issue is a doctor's handwriting.

(03:06):
Oh yeah, And it's for this reason that the last
twenty years have seen a strong push toward electronic prescriptions,
where signatures can be done in a way that is
guaranteed to be legible. But many scripts are still done
manually these days, and the problem remains such a problem
that it's still a punchline to a whole lot of

(03:27):
jokes and a public health issue that's a lot less funny.
But wait, AI is apparently coming to the rescue. Google
and many health technology firms are using artificial intelligence to
help understand the scribbles and lines that pass for vowels
and consonants. Image processors are enhancing document photos, adjusting contrast,

(03:52):
reducing noise, and improving readability. AI powered handwritten text recognition
HTI are combs massive data sets of handwriting samples to
identify characters and words and then correlate and verify them.
It can also add context, so if a perceived prescription

(04:13):
name would not match with the sickness listed a red flag,
there might prevent the wrong drug for the wrong condition,
and interpreted information can then be converted to a totally
digital format, so the final version has no squiggly lines,
dashes instead of dots, gaps and splatters and unintelligible whatever

(04:36):
on the page. Tools like Google, Lens, Ai, Prescription Reader, Feather,
deep Scribe, and other customized programs are making doctors more
readable and patients safer. But if you are still getting
pinned to paper prescriptions, I know the odds are strongly

(04:57):
in your favor that everything is going to go down
the way it's supposed to. But still it could not
hurt to do a double take, a fact check, even
a scan and a little AI to make sure your
Allegra isn't viagra, your Dorivax isn't zorivas, your Paxel isn't docsil,

(05:20):
and your Prilosec isn't prozac. Just a little due diligence
can add some preventative medicine to your prescription medicine and
make sure that you don't slip into trouble because of
the slip of a pen. And that's a true story.

(05:44):
True Stories podcast dot Com