
"Only 33% of my patients with diabetes have glycated hemoglobin levels that are at goal. Only 44% have cholesterol levels at goal. A measly 26% have blood pressure at goal. All my grades are well below my institution’s targets." And she says, "I don’t even bother checking the results anymore. I just quietly push the reports under my pile of unread journals, phone messages, insurance forms, and prior authorizations."
Meanwhile, according to the CDC, 99,000 people die in the U.S. per year because of health-care associated infections. That is equivalent of an airliner crash every day. It's three times the rate of deaths by automobile accidents.
The basic medical error problems
observed by Dennis Quaid when his twin babies almost died
due to repeated massive medically-administered overdoses
and due to software problems such as
ably analysed by Nancy Leveson
for the infamous 1980s Therac-25 cancer-radiation device
are not in any way unique to computing in medicine.
The solutions to those problems are analogous to some of the solutions
IT security needs: measurements plus
six or seven layers of aggregation, analysis, and distribution.
As Gardiner Harris reported in the New York Times, August 20, 2010, another problem is that intravenous and feeding tubes are not distinguished by shape or color:
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