Do Pharmacy Errors Spike at Start of the Month?
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TUESDAY, Jan. 11 (HealthDayNews) -- Statistics suggest Americans are more likely to die at the start of each month than any other time, and now researchers think they've found one possible culprit: mistakes in prescription drug use.
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THURSDAY, Jan. 24 (HealthDay News) -- A study of the new anti-clotting drug idraparinux for preventing strokes was stopped early because of excess bleeding, a problem that has plagued the medication.
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WASHINGTON -- Late payments and new foreclosures on adjustable-rate home mortgages made to people with spotty credit histories spiked to all-time highs in the first three months of this year.
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Patients going under the knife face a significant risk of becoming the victim of a medical error involving medication, according to a report being released today.
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Americans' supply of flu vaccine was abruptly cut in half Tuesday, prompting the government to ask most healthy adults to delay or skip flu shots so that the elderly and others most at risk from influenza can get scarce supplies.    British regulators unexpectedly shut down a major flu-shot supplier Tuesday, prompting a record shortage in this country just as flu season is about to begin...
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Half of adults are at risk of developing high blood pressure, a survey by pharmacists suggests.
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Mistakes and other incidents in hospitals ranging from administrative errors to drug overdoses frequently endanger newborns and are often preventable, French researchers reported on Thursday.
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It's a new way to push for patient safety: Don't pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Medicare will start hitting hospitals where it hurts in October, and other insurers are hot on the trail.
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The nation's retailers reported mixed results in January as frigid weather came too late in the month to help merchants clear out winter inventory. But stores' business was boosted by redemption of holiday gift cards.
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For about six months of the year, bursts of a h
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WEDNESDAY, June 27 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. hospitals that switched from using doctors&#39; handwritten prescriptions to computerized drug ordering systems had a 66 percent drop in medication errors, say the authors of a review that looked at the results of 12 studies.
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The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients &quot;despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job.&quot;About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a &quot;sense of outrage&quot; when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system&#39;s record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season.&quot;I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book,&quot; he said. &quot;We can&#39;t seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable.&quot;Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said.&quot;You break it, you fix it,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s a very simple concept. It&#39;s been around in china shops for years.&quot;In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:*&#160;Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.*&#160;Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.*&#160;The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children&#39;s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).*&#160;Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF&#39;s president. &quot;This is not rocket science,&quot; he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition.&quot;Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?&quot; Johnson said. &quot;We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we&#39;re not doing it.&quot;
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I messed up in my Nov. 21 column, "Weak Case Against Homework," and failed to include comments from the authors of one of the books I was criticizing. I am way overdue for an appointment with the ophthalmologist, so my failing eyes missed their e-mail, waiting patiently in my inbox between a rant...
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Amidst recent prescription drug recalls, health experts have tips for patients to determine the safety of their medications. Merck Pharmaceuticals&#39; September decision to withdraw its widely used arthritis
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Missed comps may be short-term noise for the soaring retailer.
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From prescribing overdoses to sticking a tube in the wrong vein, doctors-in-training made one-third more serious mistakes during typically long shifts than they did during &quot;short&quot; 16-hour ones, a Harvard study found.
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It&#39;s too early to tell whether this flu season will be severe, but some doctors are worried a major outbreak could cripple the nation&#39;s emergency rooms.