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About half of all surgeries involve some kind of medication error or unintended drug side effects, if a new study done at one of America’s most prestigious academic medical centers is any indication.
The rate, calculated by researchers from the anesthesiology department at Massachusetts General Hospital who observed 277 procedures there, is startlingly high compared with those in the few earlier studies. Those earlier studies relied mostly on self-reported data from clinicians, rather than directly watching operations, and found errors to be exceedingly rare.
“There is a substantial potential for medication-related harm and a number of opportunities to improve safety,” according to the new study, published today in the journal Anesthesiology . More than one-third of the observed errors led to some kind of harm to the patient.
[Also Covered By]: http://www.fiercehealthcare.com/story/medication-errors-occur-half-surgeries-mgh-study-finds/2015-10-26
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday October 28 2015, @11:30AM
This terrifies the anesthesiologists.
I suspect its a nearly perfect analogy for replacing pharmacists with vending machines.
As long as the system can afford to remain corrupt, we'll have extremely highly paid human vending machines and human PID controllers. After that, well...
Personally I expect their elimination to being in the military. If a mobile surgical hospital can replace two expensive officers and their part of the logistics tail with a PID controller running on an iphone and a vending machine, they'll do it.
Another thing to watch for is outsourcing just like radiology. One dude in India will "supervise" 16 anesthesia machines over the internet.