Clinton orders FEHBP plans to reduce medical errors

More than 300 Federal Employee Health Benefits Program health plans will be required to take steps to reduce medical errors under a Presidential memo issued Tuesday.

A recent report from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies concluded that preventable medical errors are responsible for more deaths each year than highway accidents, breast cancer or AIDS. Human mistakes, such as illegible handwriting on prescriptions or incomplete medical records, can be prevented through education and quality improvement, the report said.

"Our recommendations are intended to encourage the health care system to take the actions necessary to improve safety. We must have a health care system that makes it easy to do things right and hard to do them wrong," said William Richardson, chair of the committee that wrote the report.

In a memo to the secretaries of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and the head of the Office of Personnel Management, President Clinton asked those agencies to develop ways to improve health care safety for the FY 2001 budget cycle.

At OPM, that means that the letter it issues to FEHBP health plans each spring will include requirements for participating plans to use the latest in error reduction and patient safety techniques.

Such techniques include pharmacy benefit programs, which use centralized databases to ensure patients aren't mixing medications that cause adverse drug interactions, an OPM spokesperson said. Another type of error reduction program involves the use of case managers to coordinate patient care and to ensure all doctors involved in a case are fully informed.

"This will hasten the day when public reports on plan and provider performance raise the standard of care in this country and guide consumers to the highest quality, safest care available," said OPM Director Janice Lachance.

Details on the specifics of the error reduction program and how its results will be quantified are still being decided, OPM officials said.