I’m continuing to recuperate at home in preparation for the last round of chemo and nothing much is happening on the home front. I read some articles on medical system safety yesterday. Here’s a statement from one of them, “System Changes to Improve Patient Safety.”

“If patients are educated about the course of their treatment and their medications in the context of a trusting relationship, patients can also be effective at identifying errors. They should be encouraged to ask questions and to speak up when unusual circumstances arise.”

It’s hard to argue with this, and yet I do have a quibble! Putting the whole thing in the passive voice may make it read more “academic” in a certain sense, but it does nothing to make patient education happen. At least in the aviation domain, you are shown a passenger safety video – the video may be widely ignored by anyone who’s traveled more than a few times, but the attempt is at least being made.

As many have pointed out, the reason that medical accidents don’t make headline news is because that the deaths happen singly. When a large airplane crashes we notice. It’s the same with general aviation accidents, with rare exception, when a celebrity is involved, the crash of a small airplane killing one or two passengers is a quickly forgotten footnote on the local news.

Grass-roots organizations are part of the solution for raising consciousness about medical system safety and getting things done – indeed they’re probably the beginning of the solution since they are where ideas originate from. But they have a long way to go, at least in my neck of the woods. Automation is a significant part of the solution, but none of my medical providers – not one – communicates with me by email. All my prescriptions are hand written and then handed to the pharmacy for interpretation and transcription and entry into their automated system. I am not aware of how many of my providers have automated records, but I suspect most of them don’t. My suspicion is that the providers don’t use these methods because they fear that they will create more work for them – not because they fear that they are unsafe. I was heartened to hear recently that CSC is one of the companies working on a contract for the UK NHS for the automating of medical records. Does anyone know what is happening in this area in the US?