Clinic, school receive federal grant

By Christopher Schwarzen
Times Snohomish County Bureau

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The University of Washington School of Pharmacy and the Everett Clinic have received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to further their study on whether a move to computerized prescription systems reduces the number of errors involving medication.

Those errors, according to the Institute of Medicine, are responsible for as many as 98,000 patient deaths annually in the U.S.

The federal grant will fund three years of their research, which is expected to continue through 2009.

The study deals with whether computerized prescribing reduces the risk of patients receiving an incorrect dosage or the wrong medication.

The Everett Clinic, with more than 275,000 patients, writes out or fills more than 2 million prescriptions annually. A quarter of those are being written through a computerized system that auto-faxes the prescription to a pharmacy chosen by the patient.

UW researchers and Everett Clinic doctors hope to show that the computerized system reduces the chance for error by eliminating illegible, hand-written prescriptions. The computerized system also can be used to prompt doctors to cross-reference prescriptions with other medications a patient might be taking or another medical condition that prohibits the use of certain kinds of medicine.

Similar studies have been completed within hospitals, said Dr. Beth Devine, a research assistant professor at the UW School of Pharmacy. But no study has attempted to determine the success rate of a computerized prescribing system at an outpatient clinic, especially one the size of the Everett Clinic, she said.

Devine said much of the research to date was prompted by a report in the late 1990s by the Institute of Medicine, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, that claimed medical errors were responsible for more than 98,000 deaths each year in the United States.

While there are no numbers directly attributable to incorrectly medicated patients, Devine said some deaths are no doubt caused by mistakes related to medication.

About two years ago, the Everett Clinic began the switch to a computerized prescribing system, equipping physicians at its Marysville location with handheld, wireless computers. The computers are capable of pulling up electronic medical files and then can be used to send out prescriptions, said Dr. Al Fisk, the clinic's medical director and one of the study's lead investigators.
 
"This is going to eliminate those can't-read prescription errors and make it that much harder to make a mistake," Fisk said. "[The computer] keeps a nice record so that we know what medications a patient is on, and then we can auto-fax a prescription."

Researchers say they'll periodically publish results of the ongoing study beginning as early as 2006 and wrap up results in about five years, Devine said.

"This study is a mix of the academic and real-world experiences," Fisk said. "We were going to do the study regardless of the grant, but this let's us do it that much faster."

Christopher Schwarzen: 425-783-0577 or cschwarzen@seattletimes.com