Infinite Monkeys

C'mon, Robb. Surely you remember that part in the Constitution that guarantees a right to legible prescriptions. If memory serves, it's in a penumbra of an emanation of the 14th Amendment...

Dang! You know, "Constitutional Emanating Penumbras" was an upper division class. I KNEW I shouldn't have dropped out so early.

I retract my previous statement. God Save the King!

Uh oh--looks like our resident libertarian monkey is off his meds again. You know, that wouldn't happen if the government was reminding you to refill your prescription...

As the one monkey here who actually works in the healthcare IT industry, I can say that unlike many of the President's big government ideas (I'm the resident monkey who is libertarian no matter what drugs I'm on), this one isn't too bad. We do need to get more computerized, and market forces aren't going to do--the healthcare industry is a free market economist's nightmare.

(Off the topic: am I the only one who is getting tired of every article on the President mentioning protesters? Can anyone show me an article on Kerry with a similar paragraph?)

Wait a minute, David: even if computerized prescriptions are a good idea, and even if HMOs are a nightmare (a nightmare created by the United States Congress, I might add), why should such a program be set up and administered by the federal government? What's to stop an outfit like Kaiser Permanente from doing this all on its own, without taxpayer help?

And just how bad is this prescription problem, anyway? How many people are getting the wrong medicine? I know it happens -- it happened to my mom a few years ago, although no harm was done. Are there hard numbers available? Educated guesses? I might even settle for groundless conjecture, if it's amusing.

Well, as anyone who has seen "It's a Wonderful Life" knows, those pharmacists are always getting orders wrong, unless George Bailey stops them.

But on the actual point: the famous report is the one from the Institute of Medicine called To Err is Human. The report estimated that 100,000 patients a year die needlessly due to medical errors. The "illegible handwriting" bit is just media silliness; the gist of the President's speech was a move toward electronic health records, physician order entry, and better decision support (catching drug interactions at entry, for example). This will require creation of standards, which is something the government is good at doing, and it will require cooperation within the fragmented and absurd world of healthcare (and, yes, it's government's fault that it's so screwed up, which is another reason government has to fix it). There's no talk of a central government repository, by the way, despite Robb's scary implications.

Oh, and Kaiser is doing it. But most healthcare organizations aren't integrated like Kaiser.

You guys may be too young to have prescriptions. I was over 60 before I got one. The news is ... almost every perscription in the US is already on a computer. In my case the physician enters it on his office computer, then he writes me a paper copy, which I take to the pharmacy, stand in line, and have it entered on the pharmacy's computer. The only missing link is direct physican to pharmacy link. I would find this a time saving feature.