| ||
| Vol. 22, No. 18 |
| October 1, 2000 |
|
UT Public Health Receives More Than $174,000 for Medical Errors Research The University of Texas-Houston School of Public Health is one of five leading academic institutions that will receive a share of $840,000 in grants to study how to reduce medical errors.
The $174,375 that will go to UT-Houston will be used to find ways to improve medication safety by learning from experience. Researchers from other participating institutions will study such issues as controlling infection in long-term care facilities, and improving safety for surgical patients.
According to a 1999 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, medical errors account for between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths each year in the United States. The IOM study caused a surge of public interest in the topic and led to a presidential order to investigate the issue.
All of the studies will commence by Oct. 1, 2000 and are being funded for a maximum of two years. Study results will be published in peer reviewed journals.
In addition to the announcement of research grants, health care providers have undertaken a concerted campaign to help reduce medical errors. This includes the development of programs that integrate medical and pharmacy data in order to detect and, hopefully, allow physicians to prevent potentially harmful drug-to-drug and drug-to-disease interactions; encouraging physician use of hand-held prescribing devices to reduce medication errors resulting from handwriting mistakes; physician report cards for tracking care patterns for asthma, heart disease and diabetes; facilitating the use of the Internet in every physicians' office in the United States.
Other institutions that were awarded funds were the University of Washington, Emory University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine
The grants will be administered by the Academic Medicine and Managed Care Forum, an alliance of 51 academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and Aetna U.S. Healthcare.
©2006 Texas Medical Center E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/10_01_00/page_08.html |