Over 100,000 patients in hospitals die each year from mistakes in medication or procedures in hospitals even in the best hospitals as I have experienced. Medication errors went to zero at the Veteran’s Hospital when Hilary and Bill Clinton implemented it based on the Dartmouth University long term study of Medicare patients which is still ongoing.
Shannon Brownlee, a 30 year medical journalists, wrote the book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. It is based largely from both her own investigations and the Dartmouth study which examined millions of Medicare patient records to determine the outcome of patients with similar illnesses and health. The doctor working at John Hopkins, one of the best in the country, discovered too many mistakes resulting in patient deaths occurring at a hospital with the best doctors. He wanted to find out why.
In the younger population he found such juicy data as the number of hysterectomies conducted be doctors depended on the number of doctors rather than the real need to conduct this life altering operation on young women. He found the same occurred in many specialties.
The cost to Medicare varies considerably in McAllen, Texas which is highest in the nation. Surprisingly the senior population there on Medicare is among the healthiest in the nation even though poor. Their poverty forced them to eat beans. A similar demographic nearby city of El Paso has half the cost per Medicare patients with comparable results.
Unfortunately among the poor now, this has been replaced with Fast Food with a large amount of heavily subsidized cheap High Fructose Corn Syrup, a sugar that keeps us hungry so we eat more in contrast to regular cane sugar as noted in previous blogs.
Jim Kawakami, July 6, 2010, http://jimboguy.blogspot.com
Computerized Medical Records Eliminates Mistakes in Medications and Treatments as Seen in the Veterans Administration Setup by the Clinton’s, Fred Tasker, Miami Herald, July 6, 2010, You're a South Florida resident on vacation in Boise or Bogota. You suffer stomach pains and visit a local doctor. You whip out your BlackBerry, punch in your access code and show the doctor a list of your medications, allergies, past illnesses, tests, surgeries and advice from your physician back home.
Electronic medical records, or EMRs, are quickly becoming a reality for doctors and hospitals in South Florida and beyond.
If EMRs work, they'll be high-tech marvels — letting patients access their own medical records on their home computers, helping doctors coordinate tests with each other to avoid duplication, giving medical researchers access to millions of medical records.
Nearly every major South Florida hospital and many doctors are joining a push by the Obama administration to spend $19.2 billion in federal stimulus money to help create a national EMR system by 2014. … http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/06/97036/online-medical-records-raise-privacy.html Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/07/06/97036/online-medical-records-raise-privacy.html#ixzz0sw4tC9Qs
No comments:
Post a Comment