In fact, whether the patient is a child or adult, the majority of cases assigned to hospitalists are unplanned admissions and this is something with which all hospitalists struggle. But regarding transferring patients from unit to unit, says Dr. Stucky, “this is a whole different ballgame. That’s where we have a huge opportunity to make an impact.”
She suggests that matching medications to patients can be ameliorated by computer-based systems in which at each new place the hospitalist can fill in a printout regarding whether they’re continuing a drug order, changing it, or discontinuing it, and this system also works effectively on discharge. “In a perfect world,” says Dr. Stucky, … “the hospitalist would be the implementer of this kind of medication reconciliation in their institution.”
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The risk for errors is determined by both the product and the environment in which it is used.
18. Avoid Unacceptable Drug Abbreviations
Some medications have abbreviations that can be misinterpreted. The classic ones, say several hospitalists, are magnesium and morphine. Others pertain to miswritten units of administration.
Read-backs on verbal medication orders was one of the elements most cited by our hospitalists as priority communication practices. Eliminating confusing abbreviations is one of JCAHO’s National Patient Safety Goals and “hospitals are aggressively rolling out ways to remind physicians not to use them,” says Dr. Alverson.
At Dr. Manning’s institution they use the Safest in America criteria, a collaboration of 10 Twin Cities and the hospital systems in Rochester, Minn., as well as the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement. At Mayo, they call it “Write It Right.” An accentuated campaign to reduce ambiguities in medication communications, he says, has resulted in “profound improvement” in standardizing medication prescribing and following the read-back rules.
Dr. Stucky suggests that hospitalists take on mini-projects where they review the past six months of order-writing errors in their institutions, noticing any trends and, particularly, any unit-specific trends (such as the misunderstanding of the abbreviation cc). If you notice the errors are unit-specific, you can also analyze whether they are treatment-specific. In that way, “order sets can be pre-typed and all the providers have to do is fill in the numbers,” she says, adding that hospitalists can perform these analyses outside their own patient area.
19. Improper Drug Labeling, Packaging, and Storage
Drug names, labels, and packaging contribute significantly to medication errors. The risk for errors is determined by both the product and the environment in which it is used. Most hospitalists say they are continually developing new protocols and checking information multiple times. Sometimes, small changes go a long way. “Our patient safety officer has a favorite phrase: ‘How can I facilitate you to do something different next Tuesday?’ Within your own hospital, that means look at your system and pick something you know you can change,” says Dr. Stucky. “You can’t buy IT tomorrow; you can’t do physician order entries [because] your computer system doesn’t allow it—but what can you do?”
The risk for errors is determined by both the product and the environment in which it is used.
Conclusion
Dr. Angood encourages hospitalists to continue learning how to interact with other disciplines that are also evolving into hospital-based practices and to learn how to manage the specific details-of-change topics such as this list of 25—not just to gloss over them, but to understand them, and to encourage patient involvement and nurture the physician-patient relationship to help change the culture within health care.