The Devil Inside Wired Medicine – Forbes.com
When the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh installed a digital drug-ordering system to replace its old paper one in late 2002, the medication error rate declined sharply. But a strange thing happened among some of the sickest kids: Five months after the system was installed, the death rate for kids transferred to the hospital from other institutions had more than doubled.
Although the latter finding, published in 2005 in Pediatrics, was highly controversial, the authors (a group of doctors at the hospital, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) suggested that the fault lay with the hospital’s computers. A clunky user interface required up to ten mouse clicks for a single drug order. Sometimes while one doctor treated a child, a second doctor had to sit at a terminal for 15 minutes to order drugs. The computer’s wireless link seemed to freeze up at bad times. Preordering drugs for patients had become so difficult that doctors didn’t necessarily have what they needed when the patients arrived.