An Experiment with Statistics
Written by Roman on January 6, 2008 – 10:53 pm
In the end of November my partner got an excellent idea to demonstrate the advantages of our product by collecting a statistics of prescription errors in United Arab Emirates. It took us about two weeks to collect and enter 800+ prescriptions. Then we run Clinical Check – it’s a special feature of Clinical Decision Support software to analyze if the prescribed drugs have contraindications, precautions (like pregnancy and so on) or prescription has duplication in drug therapy when two or more drugs are prescribed to treat the same disease.
The result was, well, scary – about 16% of all analyzed prescriptions got pretty serious mistakes that might even lead to the patient death or disability. Actually, the number of errors is the same as in United States…but just 10 years ago.
It was interesting to see the reaction of public on this statistics. In the beginning of December we participated in the Medication Errors conference where we announced our statistics. As result, within the last few weeks in December they published one article in the local English newspaper, and then in Arabic newspaper too. The last one also published a larger article later that discussed the issue in more details. There are also couple other newspapers that have already arranged the appointments for the interview. The result is pretty good, I guess, especially considering the fact that we haven’t yet approached the specialized Healthcare magazines in the region asking them to discuss the issues of prescription errors.
There is one sensitive point – not to make Ministry of Health your enemy. Although they are slow sometimes on their daily work, they can react fast to ban somebody. The important thing here is not to blame anybody for the errors – doctors and pharmacists will always make mistakes and no software can guarantee safe treatment. The point is to offer solution that might help reducing number of errors.
It’s difficult to tell how this statistics will affect our sales. At least we can present the results to our existing and potential customers. One of the Universities here has decided to make a larger research by analyzing 20,000 prescriptions. This will bring very interesting results, I believe. So the experiment goes on!
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January 10th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
…sounds like a bit of a risky venture to me too.
From what I read in your blog, the amount of time spend to research the data has been indeed very short, that has been menioned in the article as well.
Good luck with it.
Rob.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Yes, the prescriptions were taken from a short period of time, but from different hospitals. And also, 800+ prescriptions are not a large number either. This is why we continue the research for 20,000 prescriptions, and I hope we would get a chance to analyze about 500 prescriptions daily from different healthcare institutions. These numbers will get more realistic results.
So basically, our research would be called as “preparation for the larger research”.
May 9th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
[…] pm Middle East Medical Times magazine has published the interview where I talk a little about our experiment with statistics on prescription errors in UAE. The article looks nice, especially its […]