His quote: “I have absolutely no obligation whatsoever to do anything purely in society’s best interest!” is a keeper, and one that I’ll be using as a mantra for years to come.

As per Cybernonymous’ disdain of the pen- I love my collection of pens! They write fast, cost very little to operate, and I tend to write very neat, thank-you-very-much. What you fail to mention is that computers bring about their own set of errors, including the introduction of decreased patient interaction with physicians, a whole new set of data input errors, and only with a EMR can I document (with a touch of a button) a beautiful, ledgible 3 page report without ever seeing the patient. This is such a big deal, BTW, that the National Research Council recently found that HIT systems fell short of achieving healthcare delivery goals envisioned by the Institute of Medicine. On 12/11/2008 JACHO, which is the organization that certifies hospitals, put out a Sentinel Event Alert recommending that health care organizations take a series of 13 specific steps to prevent EMR associated errors.

The most interesting study of medication errors was made by the US Pharmacopeia, which on 1/24/2005 stated that although unclear handwriting errors accounted for 2.9% of reported medication errors placing it as the 15th leading cause of these errors, computer data entry errors accounted for 13% of medication erors, placing this type of error as the 4th leading cause of errors. They found that there were 22 ways which EHR software systems can increase medication errors.

That said, I use a hybrid system in my office that I programmed using MS Office. I love it. It has served me well. I don’t do handwritten presciptions- I send them to the printer.

I won’t add on any citations to the above, since they could get caught in Histalk’s notorious email shredder. They are all in my continuously updated slideshow “HIT in the USA Under President Obama” that shows the real stats on what’s going on with HIT. URL: http://www.msofficeemrproject.com/Page3.htm . It’s a pure download-neat-HIT-stuff-webpage which tends to make Obama’s views on HIT not very rosey.

In fact, tonight I have to update it to 60 slides by adding the slides covering how the Kaiser Permanente and the British NHS HIT rollouts have recently been shown to FAIL… i.e. they did not show increased quality, did not show decreased errors, and did show continuing cost overruns. Those were 2 of the HIT installations that Obama and Daschle most admired and wanted to emulate… sheesh. Makes one want to keep using pens forever!

Cheers,
Al

Stay with me. The IOM will concede at least 90,000 deaths a year due to medical error. This is the same old figure quoted by healthcare pundits for almost a decade. Subsequent review of 7.2 million Med Par files from 2001 to 2003 revealed some 465,000 deaths due to medical misadventure. That breaks down to 155,000 patients per year for those three years of review.

The clinician’s pen is a suspect medical device that could require medical approval by FDA 510(k) process to guarantee not only diagnosis reliability but also readability of written medical processes documenting the quality of medical care delivered to a patient at the point of care. If you have ever performed manual chart reviews to document CMS data quality indicators then you will understand the disdain for the written word in medicine, if that is what those pen scratches on paper are interpreted or translated to be.

I apologize for my marked cynicism for print or cursive penmanship (the art of practice of writing with a pen) in general but this was very cathartic.

Your name is used frequently by Practice Fusion, including quotes on its website. Are there any financial closures that should be known?