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Study: Transfer patients can make big hospitals look bad
Rhode Island tries out electronic prescription system
New Mexico doctor charged with overdosing seven patients

Patient Safety Monitor Alert, June 12, 2003

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STUDY: TRANSFER PATIENTS CAN MAKE BIG HOSPITALS LOOK BAD

A new study has verified what many hospitals previously suspected: Hospital rating tools do not account for skewed statistics caused by sicker patients who transfer to large medical centers from other hospitals and are more likely to die than others.

These patients can pull down a hospital's score on measures that patients, insurers, and others use to make decisions about health care, according to a press release from the University of Michigan Health System. Study authors say that rating companies should either include the hospital's transfer rate in the statistical analysis of patient outcomes or analyze the outcomes both with and without data on transfer patients.

Researchers based the study, published in the June 3 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, on data regarding 4,579 admissions to the University of Michigan Health System's adult medical intensive care unit. Twenty five percent of those admissions were transfers from other hospitals.

RHODE ISLAND TRIES OUT ELECTRONIC PRESCRIPTON SYSTEM

Hospitals worried about errors that occur when a doctor sends a prescription to the pharmacy should check out Rhode Island's new initiative. Next month, doctors and pharmacies in that state will begin using a system that allows prescriptions to remain in electronic form from the doctor's office to the pharmacy's computers.

"Right now, when a doctor hits the button to send an electronic prescription, that information is faxed to the pharmacy and manually re-entered into the pharmacy's system," Laura Adams, president and chief executive officer of the Rhode Island Quality Institute told Information Week. People can make mistakes when they re-enter the data, she said, noting that pharmacies must call doctors to verify information in 30 percent of all prescriptions.

Next month, 70 percent of the state's pharmacies will be able to use the system, called SureScripts Messenger Services. The states of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Ohio are also testing SureScripts, according to Information Week.

NEW MEXICO DOCTOR CHARGED WITH OVERDOSING SEVEN PATIENTS

A New Mexico jury last week charged a doctor and his wife with first-degree murder of seven patients, according to the Albuquerque Journal. Investigators suspect Dr. Jesse Benjamin Henry, Jr., and his wife, Hong Lu Henry, of supplying patients with up to 250 narcotic painkiller pills in a single visit. Some of the patients later overdosed on the medications. A search warrant revealed that Henry did not examine patients adequately, and sometimes did not examine them at all, before prescribing large quantities of opiates, the paper reported.

Peter Schoenburg, Jesse Henry's lawyer, said that some of the dosages Henry prescribed would only be harmful if patients mixed them with drugs they obtained on the street, according to the paper. Tova Indritz, Hong Lu Henry's lawyer, said that Henry's wife should not be held liable because she was only a receptionist in the office.

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