Studying the Issue
The team, including HSPH professor Lucian Leape and David W. Bates of HMS, found that 6.5 percent of all patients were the victims of some kind of medication error.
After the study, Brigham and Women's Hospital instituted computer programs to regulate drug misuse, and found that the rate of error decreased by 55 percent.
Since then, Mass. General Hospital has begun to implement a similar system, and as a result of this month's report, Leape said, other hospitals both in the Boston area and nationwide are heading in the same direction.
Another Harvard study involving medical errors was the Harvard Medical Practice Study of 1990, which Leape worked on.
This study looked at medical records from 30,000 New York hospital patients, looking for medical errors.
"A lot of the best work in the field is done by professors affiliated with Harvard," said Bates, who is associate professor of medicine and chief of the Division of General Medicine at Brigham and Women's.
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