something needs to be done...
However wild an idea the smart syringe is, hospitals could do with something to prevent avoidable errors. In the UK something like 10% of people admitted to hospital suffer harm from errors, a large number of which are some combination of wrong drug/wrong patient/wrong dose.
Simple systems can prevent most errors (and I mean maybe 99% or more). Full access to patients' medical histories is not usually required: a simple identity confirmation is usually enough (unknown IDs are rare and insignificant). The US Veterans' Administration use a barcoding system where drugs, patients and staff are barcoded and all three are scanned at the point of drug administration. A fairly simple check of who and what drug and what dose manages to eliminate the vast majority of wrong dose/drug/patient errors.
Given how many errors their system prevented, the shocking thing is how few other hospital groups have adopted anything similar.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
