Thursday, October 19, 2006

U.S. Senators Evan Bayh and Richard Lugar today announced plans to introduce legislation that will require hospitals to report whether they have adopted newly established safety measures to help prevent future tragedies such as recent infant deaths at an Indianapolis hospital. In a letter, Bayh and Lugar urged the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Finance Committee to support legislation they will introduce next month that would require more in-depth reporting to track whether hospitals comply with important drug safety measures.

“While nothing can help relieve the grief felt by the infants’ families or the anguish of the dedicated health workers involved, we have developed a plan to help prevent similar tragedies from taking place in the future,” the Senators wrote in the letter. “When Congress returns next month, we plan to introduce legislation designed to reduce preventable medication errors in hospitals, and we urge the Committee to support our efforts.”

According to a recent report from the Institute of Medicine, medical errors injure at least 1.5 million Americans each year and cost our health system more than $3.5 billion per year. On average, a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error each day, and many of these mistakes are preventable.

Bayh and Lugar’s proposed legislation would build on recent quality control measures that were implemented as part of the Deficit Reduction Act. Their plan would direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to work with national medical organizations to adopt new safety measures specifically designed to prevent medication errors. Possible safety measures could include:

• Electronic prescribing to prevent errors because pharmacy staff cannot read handwriting or dosage information;
• Bar coding of individual dosages with scanners that can compare the patient record with the drug to be administered both at the time order is filled in the pharmacy and at the patient bedside;
• Using smart IV infusion pumps that alert nurses if the dose exceeds hospital-established limits before infusion begins.

Once the new safety measures are adopted, hospitals would be required to report on whether they are meeting the new standards, with the results available to the public. Hospitals that fail to report would receive less federal reimbursement under Medicare.