Can Information Systems Make Your Doctor Better?

1. What problems are hospitals and physicians encountering in diagnosing diseases and prescribing medications? What management organization, and technology factors are responsible for these problems?

Many doctors struggle to identify diseases or misdiagnose patients. Substantial drug errors resulting in injury to over 1.5 million Americans. These drug errors include drug interactions, inappropriate prescriptions and forgetting secondary prescriptions. These preventable drug errors may result in $3.5 billion in additional billing annually to patients. Many of these errors can be attributed to human errors including; poor handwriting, memory lapses, fatigue, distractions and the total volume and complexity of available medications. Some information systems used to prevent these errors actually create new ways of making errors because of their design.


3. What obstacles prevent computer systems from improving the medical industry? How can these obstacles be removed?

One obstacle includes designing the information systems too much for physicians rather than nurses, who feel the greater impact from these systems. Designers of these information systems must acknowledge who will be utilizing the systems most frequently and accommodate these nurses. Another drawback of these systems are that they can be more rigid than traditional paperwork, not allowing a physician to write orders until a patient is admitted. Duke has addressed this problem by adding a new unit to the system that permits virtual admissions of patients.

Doctors and nurses must trust the system and not ignore automated prompts, which can be another obstacle. Many doctors resist the idea of needing help remembering procedures and treatments. To remove this obstacle, medical staff need to be informed of the accuracy of these systems and be educated on the time-saving component of these systems. Finally, some doctors argue that Diagnostic Decision-Support systems have not proved to be more successful than human diagnostics. They also grown at the cost and time involved with these systems. Physicians need to be provided with a ROI calculation and all the data that proves that these systems can prevent errors, which ultimately saves lives and money.