The Web's contribution to Healthcare?
So, here's a little story. My health is not the best, so I take more medicine than the average person. (When I last went to see my doctor, I brought a printout with the dosages of every pill I take, prescription or otherwise.) But as the child of a med school professor, I am perhaps a bit less trusting than most: I try never to take a pill that I can't positively ID.
A few months back, my pharmacy switched suppliers on one of my medications. I opened up the bottle, expecting my familiar pink oval pill, and found a round white one instead. After 15 minutes of web searching failed to find me an answer on what the pill was, I dumped out some more pills, thinking that perhaps the markings on my first sample had been damaged. To my shock, I had two different size pills in the bottle.
I promptly went to the pharmacy. They confirmed that the larger pill was the correct one (and the smaller one was the same medicine in a lower dose). Then the pharmacist made up a correct bottle of pills. I asked how this could have happened and she explained that most pharmacies no longer hand-count pills; they pop a pre-filled cartridge into a counting machine and punch in the number. The cartridge must have been mis-filled, and they were going to have to contact everyone who had been dispensed from that cartridge. (I later found out that this was only one other customer.)
So, tonight I had a new medicine and went through the same exercise. This time, however, instead of having to find the manufacturer's descriptions of their medicines, I discovered an easier way courtesy of the web. It took me less than a minute to verify that I had the correct medicine. So kudos to the people at drugs.com for designing a useful tool. Now we need to encourage more people to use it; there's a large demographic for which self-administered medication errors are a leading cause of accidental deaths. So look up those pills, people!
Posted at 09:30PM Sep 12, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |