Most of the doctors are popular for the kind of sloppy handwriting they have; so many movies make fun of such doctors, but research states that more than 7,000 patients lose their lives because of the sloppy handwriting of the doctors!
It may seem shocking to you, but it is also true! In the year 2006, a research was conducted to find the cause behind the death of a group of people. According to National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine, preventable medication mistakes took place several times and it also injures around 1.5 million Americans every year. The errors take place when the abbreviations are not clearly mentioned and also, when the patients are unable to understand which medicine need to be consumed in what amount.
“Thousands of people are dying, and we’ve been talking about this problem for ages,” says Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a Chicago-based health care technology company, that initiated the project. “This is crazy. We have the technology today to prevent these errors, so why aren’t we doing it?”
The sloppy handwriting makes everything so confusing that despite the prescription from the doctor, the pharmacist is unable to understand the name of the medicine and the patient is unable to understand whether he is given the right medicine or the wrong one. In the end, the patient is the one, who suffers. If the medicine is consumed more than required, he is bound to go through terrible health issues; over dosage also leads to the death of the patient.
Considering the importance of medicines and prescriptions, a lot of doctors have now shifted to electronic prescriptions. However, there are still many doctors, who stick to the traditional pen and paper method to give medicines to their patients. This is because the doctors need to invest money as well as time to introduce e-prescriptions for their patients and not all can afford the same.
If you are a doctor, you better work on your handwriting, or you may be killing some of your patients, instead of helping them cope up with their illness!
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