Bad HIT in pharmacy: Hospital to pay half million dollar fine after pharmacist ' s drug theft

This is an example where bad health IT in an " infrastructure " system (as opposed to a clinician-facing system) led to a quite unfortunate outcome for the community.Bad Health IT ( " BHIT " ) is defined as IT that is ill-suited to purpose, hard to use, unreliable, loses data or provides incorrect data, is difficult and/or prohibitively expensive to customize to the needs of different medical specialists and subspecialists, causes cognitive overload, slows rather than facilitates users, lacks appropriate alerts, creates the need for hypervigilance (i.e., towards avoiding IT-related mishaps) that increases stress, is lacking in security, compromises patient privacy or otherwise demonstrates suboptimal design and/or implementationSecurity seemed severely lacking in this pharmacy information system:Hospital to pay $510K fine after pharmacist ' s drug theftPhilly.com (Philadelphia Inquirer/Daily News)January 9, 2017http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/real-time/Abington-Hospital-to-pay-fine-for-system-failure-after-drug-theft-by-pharmacist.htmlAbington Memorial Hospital will pay $510,000 in fines after one of its pharmacists was able to exploit a loophole and steal drugs for illegal use, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday.In July, 2013, the hospital detected a discrepancy during a drug inventory. An internal investigation found that the pharmacist, Renata Dul,had on 85 occasions stolen more than 35,000 units of a controlled substance, including oxycodone, by ...
Source: Health Care Renewal - Category: Health Management Tags: Abington Memorial Hospital bad health IT bad phamacy IT DEA healthcare IT risks US Attorney ' s Office Source Type: blogs