Several miles to the northwest, doctors at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx have eliminated the use of paper, relying on a network of computers to order everything from blood tests to prescription medications. The method is so futuresque that doctors can change, add or peruse patients' medications from their home computers, or even from a laptop while out of town. And at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, officials have installed a multimillion-dollar, electronic medication order system. Electronic prescribing and dispensing of medications mark the wave of the future, medical experts say. And the trend is a welcome one in many quarters, because medications increasingly have become a public health threat.
Therapeutic drugs can prove lethal when given in too high a dose or in too frequent a course.
The estimated number of deaths due to prescription errors varies widely, with one study putting the figure as high as 7,000 annually. The FDA estimates 365 deaths and up to 1.3 million injuries a year. Despite a trend toward computerized prescription ordering and dispensing, which has been under way for about decade in hospitals, fewer than 5 percent of medical centers nationwide rely exclusively on such systems. Most hospitals on Long Island and in Queens and Manhattan still primarily rely on the pen for virtually all in-hospital medication orders, a survey by Newsday shows. When an electronic system is used the number of medication errors is reduced by 55 percent, said Dr. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.