Hospital based clinician's use of technology for patient care related communication

Recently ISMP in the U.S. did a survey about texting medical orders in healthcare.

This article in the Pharmacy Technology Report highlights the results.

You can also find the full report from ISMP here.

This form of communication certain lends itself to errors as is highlighted in the above report.

Organizations across all healthcare domains need to take the time to create policy about the safe transmission of medication orders. Having a policy only on verbal orders is not enough.

If you have already created a policy - please share the key learnings with the group.

Thanks
Lisa
ISMP Canada

Here is an interesting abstract - to lend some food for thought.

And I want to alert you to a situation that a colleague shared. It was related to texting and autocorrect.

A specialist texted a medication order to the GP. The GP wrote it as a medication order for the patient (I believe this was in a LTC facility). BUT, the drug name, sent by the specialist had auto-corrected to a different drug name! The pharmacist reviewing the order, followed up because it was a non-formulary medication. That was how the error was detected.

So I am curious. I had never heard of Dr's texting medication orders. But here is an example, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening throughout our health care system. The above abstract demonstrate that texting is happening. Obviously patient confidentiality and secure transmission needs to be incorporated. But medication safety is clearly a concern. Free texting orders (i.e. no database selection), with auto-correct functionality is a recipe for disaster with medication orders.

What is happening at your organization? Any policies developed around the communication of medication orders using this new technology?
We could all benefit from sharing our experiences.

Lisa Sever