Category: Errors

Saving Lives Through More Sleep

Or, at least, that’s the theory.  Ever since the infamous Libby Zion case – surely exemplar of similar occurrences throughout medicine training programs – institutional focus on resident workload and wellness has been emphasized as a surrogate marker for patient safety.  Better-rested residents, working fewer hours, will have fewer misses and derive more substantial benefit from their educational opportunities.

This randomized trial from the University of Pennsylvania evaluating the performance of the new protected sleep time afforded to interns under ACGME rules.  These authors used wrist-based sleep activity monitors to measure the cumulative sleep time on-shift for interns randomized to either traditional 30-hour blocks or blocks with a nap period between 12:30am and 5:30am.  The primary outcome was sleep obtained on shift, with secondary outcomes being total hours of sleep during a call cycle, and post-call scores on the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale.

Well, protected sleep time works – 2.86 vs. 1.98 hours of sleep at the VA hospital, and 3.04 vs. 2.04 at the University hospital, with significantly fewer no-sleep nights as well.  And, the Karolinska Sleepiness Scale means also favored the nap-time group 7.10 vs. 6.65 at the VA and 6.79 vs 5.91 at the University.

But, as I said before, these are surrogate markers for patient safety.  One extra hour of sleep?  Less than a full point on the KSS?  Let’s look specifically at the subjective self-reported meaning of the KSS in the range these physicians were reporting:

  • 5 = neither alert nor sleepy
  • 6 = some signs of sleepiness
  • 7 = sleepy, but no effort to keep awake
  • 8 = sleepy, some effort to keep awake

Regardless of intervention group, they’re … pretty much a little sleepy, but not generally struggling to stay awake.  I remain a little skeptical this will account for a substantial improvement in patient safety – at least, at this single-residency experience.

“Effect of a Protected Sleep Period on Hours Slept During Extended Overnight In-hospital Duty Hours Among Medical Interns”

Mistakes In Cardiac Arrest Cause Bad Outcomes

Not surprising, of course, but an interesting analysis of a large data set.

The authors pulled 108,636 in-hospital cardiac arrest cases out of the National Registry of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and evaluated them for “errors” – such as multiple intubation attempts, incorrect medication administration, delays in code team activation, etc.  After attempting to control for all the differences (of which there were many) in level of care and type of patient suffering cardiac arrest, they finally find that any documented error in resuscitation led to a 9.9% increase in adjusted hazard ratio for death in non-VF/pVT, and a 34.2% increase in VF/pVT patients.

Specifically, when they break out the different types of errors, essentially all the effect size was related to delays in medication administration for non-VF/pVT, and delays in medication and failure to defibrillate in VF/pVT.

“Impact of resuscitation system errors on survival from in-hospital cardiac arrest”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21963583

Resident Productivity Does Not Predict ABEM Scores

Simple, single-institution study of 11 years of resident in-service scores, patients-per-hour, and ABEM qualifying examination scores – and, as previously shown, only PGY-3 in-service examination scores predicted ABEM oral and written examination scores.
Simulated oral board examination scores did not correlate with ABEM oral examination scores, and the relative number of patients-per-hour had no significant correlations between any testing.
I would say that bears out my observational experience – doing more has no bearing on whether you might be doing more incorrectly.
“Outcome Measures for Emergency Medicine Residency Graduates: Do Measures of Academic and Clinical Performance During Residency Training Correlate With American Board of Emergency Medicine Test Performance?”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21999560

Good luck to everyone taking their ABEM exam today!

Malpractice Risk in Emergency Medicine

I was actually surprised by these statistics – I expected Emergency Medicine to be higher.  After all, we’re meeting people with potentially unrealistic expectations, suffering long wait times, without continuity of care, and potential bad outcomes lurking everywhere.

But, really, our claims against and claims with payout are really pretty much average across specialties.  Neurosurgery and Thoracic Surgery are the nightmare specialties, where nearly a 5th of physicians practicing in those specialties has a claim filed against them each year.  Another interesting statistic was that Gynecology, only a little above average in claims filed against, has the highest percentage of payouts.

Neurosurgery, Neurology, and Internal Medicine lead the way in median payout, but Pediatrics, Pathology, and Ob/Gyn lead the way in mean payout – apparently skewed by the occasional massive award.

Given the legislation pending in many states these days giving additional protections to Emergency Physicians and physicians on-call to Emergency Departments, it’s really not a bad time to be in EM, from a liability standpoint.

“Malpratice Risk According to Physician Specialty”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21848463

Residency Is Thinly Veiled Healthcare Rationing!

Apparently, we’re still $376 million dollars short in funding just to meet the 2003 ACGME work hours regulations, in terms of hiring additional staff, etc.  So, of course, there should be no problem getting the remaining $1.4 billion needed to bring us up to date with the new rules.  And there’s still the matter of these authors saying that’s still not good enough.

They also say, more stick, less carrot.  For patients!  Think of the children!

Of course, they’re probably right.  A lot of EM training is stressful, but it isn’t barbaric.  We have enough off-service rotations to realize we’re one of the relatively coddled residencies in brute terms of sleep deprivation and time away from the hospital.  My sister just finished her PGY-1 in general surgery by going Q2 into the break before 2nd year.  We’re not in compliance, we’re not operating at our peak abilities, and we’re not exhaustively supervised.  Patients are harmed, no doubt.

But that’s the reality of the funding situation and the budgets proscribed by Congress.

Now, if you want go out and inflame a mob, you could invoke this as part of healthcare “rationing”, letting undertrained, barely-doctors practice on the sickest patients because we choose to allow a few people to be harmed to save money.

“Implementing the 2009 Institute of Medicine recommendations on resident physician work hours, supervision, and safety.”
http://www.dovepress.com/implementing-the-2009-institute-of-medicine-recommendations-on-residen-peer-reviewed-article-NSS

Everything is a Poison…

…when taken in inappropriate amounts.

The NYT reports on a recent AHRQ release that doesn’t tell us a lot that’s new – more hospital and ED visits are coded with medication side effects – a “50% increase since 2004”.  The problem with the lay article is that it focuses on these issues as “medication errors” as some alarming decline in quality in U.S. healthcare.  Part of the problem with this release is that it’s simply data – it’s not a study or a statistical analysis that attempts to control for other confounding influences – have the number of prescriptions for each of these classes gone up?  What’s the average age of these patients presenting with errors (i.e., aging boomers)?  There are a lot of other factors contributing to whether a medication results in an adverse effect, and they aren’t just “errors”.  The ED data isn’t all that insightful, although it is interesting to see how it differs from the inpatient errors.  The #1 culprit for the ED is “Other”, which is 261k compared to 118k opiate adverse events – which basically invalidates their data when most of your data points fall into an unknown category.

News Flash – Better Electronic Medical Records Are Better

In this article, providers are asked to complete a simulated task in their standard EMR – which is Mayo’s LastWord supplemented by Chart+ – vs a “novel” EMR redesigned specifically for a critical care environment with reduced cognitive load and increased visibility for frequently utilized elements and data.  In their bleeding patient scenario, their novel EMR was faster and resulted in fewer errors.  So, thusly, a better EMR design is better.

While it seems intuitively obvious – you still need studies to back up your justification for interface design in electronic medical records.  Their approach in testing is one I’d like to see expanded – and perhaps even implemented as a regulatory standard – evaluation on cognitive load and a certain level of task-based completion testing with error rates at a certain level.  Electronic medical records should be treated like medical devices/medications/equipment that should be rigorously failure tested.  While EMRs are far more complicated instruments, studies such as this one, illustrate that an EMR with interfaces designed for specific work environments to aid in effective and efficient task-completion save time and reduce errors.

The main issue I see with EMR these days is that the stakeholders and motivators behind this initial wave of implementation in financial – systems in place to capture every last level of service provided to a patient in order to increase revenues.  Now, the next generation and movement with EMRs is to look at how they can increase patient safety, particularly in light of threats of non-payment for preventable medical errors.  Again, financial motivation, but at least this financial motivation is going to motivate progress and maturation of medical records as tools to protect patients, not simply to milk them for profits.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21478739