The problem, of course, is that elsewhere in the chain there was in fact too much checking and too little trust. In this case, it started with not trusting the physician to enter a known dose and requiring an unnecessary conversion, which kicked off the chain of events. This was immediately followed by the problem of alarm fatigue, where practically no set of medication orders can be entered without triggering a slew of useless automated warnings.
The problem of having to deal with too many alarms is not unique to the hospital system mentioned in this article. I discovered the other day that at least one model of ventilator has an alarm that sounds when any object sits in front of the display screen. There was a stethoscope dangling in front of a corner of that screen where nothing was displayed, and an alarm went off of approximately the same urgency as one that would sound if the ventilator were about to blow a patient's lungs out. The same alarm that goes off when a patient's heart rate goes from 60 to 250 bpm sounds when the patient's heart rate goes from 99 to 101 bpm. The pharmacist who was supposed to be checking my orders for sanity once paged me out of a patient room because he couldn't find the URL for the hospital's policy on titrating a particular medication, a document issued by the pharmacy. Most people would agree that it's insane to text and drive on the highway, and yet this is essentially what's being expected of every physician in every hospital while they're making major medical decisions.
If you read the article you will find that the amount of blind trust, as you call it, was created by the system saving the nurses ass a fuckton of times.
Makes perfect sense to trust it at that point.
I am more concerned that any medical system allows such a shitty UI, or allows giving something that could be a fatal dose through the system.
And to think that many are led to believe that the medical system is filled with "professionals" who know what they're doing.
I see enough people just blinding trusting the "experts", because they must be right, because they were trained by a university/college for many years.
Maybe I'm ranting, but I'm sick of blind faith in a system demonstrated more often than not, to be broken in various ways.
Medication errors are common enough that they happen on a regular basis in any reasonably sized hospital. They happen both with or without electronic systems.
The majority of errors are caught — by the prescriber, by the pharmacist, or by the nurse administering — but a few fall through the cracks. Order of magnitude errors, where the dose is x10^n the intended dose are some of the more common errors.
We have a lot of safeguards — for example packaging medications in dosages that are likely to be safe for a single dose — but there are also some factors that make errors more likely, such as paediatrics (who need smaller does), geriatrics (who often have many different medications which can interact), and critical care (where things move fast, and big doses might be needed).
I'm a student doctor, and hopefully you believe me that medicine is hard. Electronic systems might help with some of the hard bits, but they're often a hindrance, or pose their own hidden dangers. As a software engineer I know that a lot of medical software is far from fit for purpose.
Order of magnitude errors aren't that hard, it is improbable that a hospital will need to prescribe enough drugs for a small horse.
Doctors seem to run too much on autopilot, they leave discretion to laboratories who give recommended ranges for various hormones/vitamins/chemicals in the blood.
I won't disagree that medicine is hard, but this looks like a UX design flaw, the UX should factor in drug company recommendations for dosage per patient weight and present a graph, there should be some method of compare and contrast to recognize an error happened.
> Order of magnitude errors aren't that hard, it is improbable that a hospital will need to prescribe enough drugs for a small horse.
Weight range in children's hospitals ranges from 100s of grams to 100s of kilos - that's three orders of magnitude right there.
> Doctors seem to run too much on autopilot, they leave discretion to laboratories who give recommended ranges for various hormones/vitamins/chemicals in the blood.
Both population biochemistry and laboratory assays vary between hospitals and labs. So it's actually really important that we interpret biochemical results in relation to the normal ranges provided to us by the lab. Also, those normal ranges are not just set by the lab without thought, there are pathologists and clinical chemists involved in the process.
I think we think about these numbers a whole lot more than you think we think about them.
Well university hospitals run lots of "experimental protocols" where physicians need the autonomy and flexibility for prescribe all sorts of medications. Just curation of drug-drug interactions tables is a huge butt-load of work, and we do have "hard stops" for all sorts of potentially dangerous interactions.
Ultimately however, you need systems in place to control and regulate these systems (such as pharmacy, nurses, other physicians). Obviously this system had a major failure, but it's why this is the special exception rather than the rule. And for what it's worth, this article (by Bob Watcher, who basically invented hospital medicine) is part of any major graduate level healthcare education.
One of the biggest problems I have seen with tech getting into healthcare is that they seem to forget the human interaction portion of healthcare that mostly happens offline. Yes, technology can have an enormous impact, but you can't just "technology" away all the problems in our current healthcare system.
It’s funny you belittle the medical profession considering any rando can make a Github account and apply for software jobs with zero training.
No, the medical system isn’t perfect. It’s made up of humans, shocker. Ignoring the cost (in America), it does pretty well most of the time, and I’d rather blindly trust people who study medicine for 12+ years than someone who would otherwise try to drain my blood and balance my “humours”.
I suspect it's pretty common. I recently corrected a prescription / dosing issue with my 89-year-old grandfather that was largely the result of the people involved not sanity-checking what was going on.
I'm still of the opinion that most people are better off letting doctors and nurses do their job than trying to manage their own health based on stuff they've read on the internet. There's a lot of bad information out there and sorting through it takes practice. You have to enjoy reading medical literature more than blogs.
The specifics: he's in a home hospice care situation as a result of severe aortic stenosis along with some complicating factors. Hospice is designed to provide "last two weeks" care for their patients, and they have a specific drug cocktail for that, but he's been on home hospice for over a year now because his body just isn't done yet, and there is no death-with-dignity law in his state (nor available providers in the neighboring state).
The drug cocktail is an opioid, usually morphine, along with a benzodiazepine, usually Lorazepam (generic Ativan). Taken together, they help relieve anxiety, reduce respiratory distress, and lower blood pressure. That last is important, because the morphine/benzo cocktail is specifically cautioned against in medical literature for elderly patients who are still ambulatory, because it creates a fall risk. They go to stand up to use the bathroom, and there isn't sufficient blood pressure to stay conscious, and they pass out and hit the floor, hard.
And that's exactly what happened to him. The third time, it hospitalized him and, because his speech had been slurred and his consciousness had been altered before the fall, I suspected his medication wasn't right. I went out there and carefully went through everything, and sure 'nuff, that's what it was.
The doctors just prescribed whatever hospice asked for, and hospice just asked for their usual recipe. It took an annoying number of meetings with staff before a younger visiting physician dropped in to one of the meetings and followed up with the literature I was citing. The next morning they started reducing his dosages and he began recovering, including getting his mental faculties back.
He's been back home for a couple of months now, doing well.
Physicians aren't magic. But, they work in a field that's totally alien to most of us here on HN, and trying to navigate the field as a layman can easily lead you into some pretty woo-woo nonsense. Trust, but verify.
Medicine isn't alien if you spend enough years caring about it. The problem is, most people are of the attitude that they shouldn't pay any mind to the science, because the doctors will take care of it. This leads to total dependence on the infallibility of these professionals - and we all know that no professionals are infallible despite their title. The main jig docs have over polymathy knowledge-driven intelligent folk is first-hand sight/smell/ and feel for conditions by seeing patients day in and day out. Drugs though? Most of everyone can understand what would look sketch as fuck in terms of dosing. It pays to have some semblance of heuristics on what competent care and pharmacuetical administration looks like.
The populace would be far better off if we all stopped feigning lack of interest for the things that truly matter. Like medicine/biology. It's the study of us. Sure, delegate decisions to those in the day in, day out - that is diligence. But don't just accept to hear jargon. Learn what's going on. Be active. Knowledge isn't agnostic to specific fields..especially when its about your body itself. That is human knowledge. And everybody who is living should at least be half competent in knowing whether 38 pills of an antibiotic makes any goddamn sense. If this nurse had been a knowledge worker first, and a robotic nurse second, she probably would have caught the issue. Over specialization creates idiots following scripts. Meh..
I’m sorry I usually try not to do this but this is some seriously dangerous advice.
It took me literally 30 seconds to find the interaction you’re talking about while tapping about on my phone. Being informed about side effects and interactions needs to be the patient’s (or their family) job.
The space may be alien but we have people who we are paying to help Sherpa us through it. Ask questions. Ask why. If you don’t understand don’t blindly trust - ask your doctor. Seek second opinions.
I’m just a dev, I have 0 medical training. But I know the FDA publishes side effects and interactions. I always understand these before taking anything. Yeah I don’t understand the gibberish in pharmacology sections of things but I can read a list of effects and ask a doctor about them.
TLDR - if you don’t understand your care ask. If the provider won’t explain find another provider who will.
Have had docs prescribe med combos (same doc, same visit) that would have resulted in permanent damage or death if not caught. Luckily we have three people check all my other half’s meds before she takes them. She does an FDA search and checks drug/drug interactions. I do one independently and her father, idk what he does, but he’s actually an oncologist so presumably better than our checks. (Outpatient)
Too many close calls over the years. People make mistakes, it happens, ultimately the patient needs to be responsible for their care or have someone acting in their best interests.
Of course all of this gets into things like medically informed consent and patient goals.
Well on the outpatient side, the volume of drugs a doctor is prescribing is horrendously outpaced by the number of order you're getting as a hospitalist. When you are responsible for about a dozen patients and some need your attention NOW, it's not feasible to do a complete drug-drug interaction check. But that's where A) the modern EHR that has been invested into it by the healthcare system to build drug-drug interaction tables, and B) relying on the hospital pharmacists to modify orders when necessary. It's about building a robust system that integrates human systems and enhancing them with technology.
