The Use of Computer Systems to Read the Handwriting of Doctors

However, there are issues with this system as well because the computer is only as smart as we allow it to be. If pharmacy puts in the computer the wrong medication or dose, or information is incorrect, the computer will still allow you to administer. It goes back to communication, knowing your patient and how important it is to still ask questions and have conversation with your patient about the medication you are about to give them. Read their history and physical to get a better idea of everything going on with your patient so we can continue to provide safe quality care.

The one feature that got the most attention and strongly influenced its demise was its handwriting recognition capability. In all message pads, handwriting recognition was the basis of data input to many of the built-in applications and functions. According to Professor Luckie, this handwriting recognition depends solely on Paragraph International Inc.’s Calligrapher recognition engine. Calligrapher technology was limited by the dictionary of words to which it has access (Luckie, n.d.). This shows that if you write a word that doesn’t exist in the dictionary, then Calligrapher is not going to recognize it correctly and often suggests funny but incorrect phrases as the user wrote.

My time as an Emergency Room Medical Scribe has been insightful to a point that it has solidified my career path. Prior to entering this field of work, I didn’t realize how little I had known about terminology, doctor-patient interaction, or procedures. With a behind the scenes look, I could not only view but understand the reasoning behind a physician’s medical decision making. For example, there was once a patient who had the chief complaint of abdominal pain. This patient had been to the ER multiple times in the past and after a multitude of physical exams and imaging there was nothing to show as abnormal. Hitherto, the physician I was working with had a lengthy discussion with the patient and decided to do a CT after explaining the risks.

Due to the large number of consumers being prescribed multiple medications, and the complexity of managing those medications, it is of a major safety concern that systems are in place for clinicians to reconcile patients medications to resolve any discrepancies in what the patient is using, or should be using, and newly added ones.

These systems will also help cut down on medication errors by comparing the patient’s to medications or interventions so that it is given to the correct patient. Also documents the care given so there would be no human error in the case of questioning whether care had been given as long as the caregiver documents in the record. These features of the electronic health record are in place to promote patient safety by reducing errors.

The nurse must verify the physician’s medication order, including the dose and time, and then the pharmacy is responsible for their own checks and balances via the BCMA system in order to complete the dispensing phase of the medication (Gooder, 2011). The nurse enters the BCMA system with a login and password and is able then to see a list of the virtual due list for a specific patient. The computer on wheels is then taken to that patient’s room and the five rights of medication administration begin. As nurses, we are taught to use the five rights of drug administration are (1) right patient (2) right medication (3) right dose (4) right route and (5) right time. By scanning the barcode on the patient’s hospital identification band, the nurse then asks for the patient to verbally state their name and date of birth, which can be verified by the nurse on the virtual due list and then choses the medication that are due for administration at that time. The medication is dispensed and the nurse is able to scan the barcode on the medication, the scanning triggers the automatic documentation of the medication given (Kelly, 2012).

Encourage the use of computer-generated or electronic medication administration records. Plan for the implementation of computerized prescriber order entry systems. Consider the use of machine-readable code (i.e., bar coding) in the medication administration process. Use computerized drug profiling in the pharmacy. Be a demanding customer of pharmacy system software; encourage vendors to incorporate and assist in implementing an adequate standardized set of checks into computerized hospital pharmacy systems (e.g., screening for duplicate drug therapies, patient allergies, potential drug interactions, drug/lab interactions, dose ranges, etc.)”. (Association,

When I say this, however, most people would picture the nurse giving the wrong medication due to lack of focus on the tasks at hand. While this could happen, I have noticed during my time at hospitals that the doctor orders are still hand written for the most part. Consequently, they can be very hard to be read legibly much less correctly translated into proper medication dosages. The first suggestion I would give to an organization would be that they required all orders to be submitted securely, by the doctors, to the pharmacy be electronic means.

I cannot to begin to express how often prescription drug errors occur when physicians give patients handwritten prescriptions. E-Prescribing eliminates the chances of illegibility and misunderstanding of instructions on handwritten prescriptions.

The Digital Doctor, “The Overdose” (Chapters 12–19) provides an example of how easily a drug overdose can occur. In this real life an example, a doctor enters a prescription for a home medication of a newly admitted patient, which is systematically sent to the pharmacist for review. Based on the recommendation of the pharmacist, the doctor revises the dose for the patient and incorrectly enters an order that is more than 1,000% of the patient’s normal dose. The order is then sent back to the pharmacist who sees what he expects to see, and signs off on the revision.

After the interview with my nurse manager, I came up with the PICO question which states: “Does the computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system reduce the number of medication errors compared to the common paper system being used today?” This question is important and I selected it because the population that the Belvoir Community hospital serves includes army officers of all ages both active and retired including their spouses and children. This group includes two sub groups of highly vulnerable persons which include the very young and the very old, who have a high-risk effect for medication errors because the potential adverse drug event is three times greater than an adult hospitalized patient (Levine et al., 2001). CPOE is not a panacea, but it does represent an effective tool for bringing real-time, evidence-based decision support to physicians. Nurses are the last defense level of protection against medication errors, and are solely responsible for the dispensing, administering, and monitoring of medications. In healthcare, computers can be used to help facilitate clear and accurate communication between health care professionals. When using a CPOE system it allows physicians to type in prescriptions right into the device or computer which significantly lessens any mistakes that can occur when

Electronic Medical Records or Computerized Medical Record System what is it and what are the advantages along with the disadvantages of using this system? That is what we will discuss in this paper.

A Pharmacovigilance system, similar to any system, is described by its structures, procedures and results. A mind boggling and fundamental relationship exists between wide scopes of accomplices in the act of medication healthcare checking. These accomplices should mutually suspect, comprehend and react to the ceaselessly expanding requests and desires of people in general, healthcare executives, approach authorities, legislators and healthcare experts.

Not only does the electronic method of prescribing save time, it has also cut down on the number of accidents caused by the misinterpretation of handwriting. Although now almost obsolete, hand-written prescriptions have been the cause of many medical errors because certain sound-alike or look-alike drugs have, in the past, been incorrectly substituted for one another. A report given by the insurance company, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield disclosed that if all physicians were to begin using electronic-prescription systems, “more than two million adverse reactions or events – ranging from inconsequential to severe – could be avoided each year” (wgrz.com). According to pharmacist and associate director for the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Drug Safety, Jerry Phillips, “Six-hundred sound-alike or look-alike drug pairs have been identified as possible sources of error since 1992” (nytimes.com). For example, Lamictal, a mood-stabilizing anticonvulsant, is quite similar in spelling to Lamisil, an antifungal drug. Because of these strong similarities, it is not difficult to understand how easy it could be for medical personnel to mistake certain medications. But with e-prescribing, because the prescription is sent directly from the prescriber to the pharmacy, the number of accidents caused by misinterpretation of handwriting has already been

Abstract : The Objective of this project is to recognise english handwriting from a given document image. In this report we have used 40point feature extraction to extract pattern from the characters and then use this data to train artificial neural network. This system is very successful in recognition of handwritten characters. Hence this system will be suitable to convert handwritten text into text document.