This post has been shared by the AdvoConnection Blog. It was written with a patient-client audience in mind, but might be useful to you, too.
It is provided so you can find it in a search here at myAPHA.org, but you’ll need to link to the original post to read it in its entirety. Find the link to that post at the end of the excerpt.
Why Won’t My Doctors Talk to Each Other?
Mrs. Adams had been visiting her son and his family. She was reading a book to her grandson, when she began to have trouble breathing and started breaking out in hives. She passed out, and her son dialed 9-1-1…. She’s back in her son’s home again now, looking back over the entire experience which was horribly traumatic, not just for her but for her son, her little grandson, and the entire family. They thought she was going to die, and according to the EMTs, she almost did. What caused the hives and the breathing interruption? It turned out she was taking two medications that conflicted with each other. One drug was prescribed for her months ago by her cardiologist. The other had been prescribed just the day before by her rheumatologist to treat her arthritis. Two drugs conflicted. It was not that she was allergic. It was that those two drugs should never have been prescribed for the same patient to be taken at the same time. The rheumatologist never should have prescribed the one he did. He almost killed Mrs. Adams with that prescription. (And – of note – wait until Mrs. Adams gets the bill for the trip to the ER!) Conflicting drugs cause problems every day for patients. Despite the warnings in the literature, in the enclosures that come with the prescription, and sometimes even in the patient’s electronic medical record, drug conflicts cause illness and death every day. According to the FDA, one patient per day in the United States dies from these sorts of medical mistakes, and another 1.3 million are injured. How does that happen? Because too many doctors don’t read their patients records, nor do they talk to each other. If Mrs. Adam’s rheumatologist had looked at her record, he would have seen that she was taking the drug prescribed by her cardiologist. If he wasn’t sure whether there would be a conflict, the click of a mouse could have provided that information. Even better, the dialing of a phone would have put him in touch with her cardiologist to discuss possibilities. So why didn’t he double check? There may be a few reasons: The list of drugs Mrs. Adams takes was too difficult to find in the medical record – so he didn’t take the time to do it. A page in her medical record that would warn of possible conflicts was…