Cutting the cost of medical errors

Katie Went is on a mission to improve patient care and remove the disturbing number of prescribing errors that occur in General Practices and hospitals.

The second-year School of Computing PhD student is investigating whether hand-written prescribing in an intensive care unit by medical doctors could be replaced by a novel electronic design.

Katie said, "About 200 million prescriptions are estimated to be generated in NHS hospitals every year and almost all of these are handwritten by medical doctors or nurses."

"Linked to this, an estimated 1200 deaths per year can be attributed to medical drug errors in the UK."

Katie was awarded the University's prestigious Queen's College Scholarship to fund her postgraduate study into making hospital prescribing safer. The Scholarship is awarded every three years to one student from across the whole University.

After graduating in 2005 with a first class honours degree in Mathematics and Applied Computing, she is now in the second year of her PhD in the School of Computing.

As part of her final year undergraduate project in Applied Computing, Katie created a prototype of a computerised prescribing system which could be used in hospitals to improve the drug treatment process for patients in intensive care. The system was developed with a clinical advisory team at Ninewells Hospital.

Soon after graduating in 2005, the talented student was invited to take her innovative research work to the SET for Britain (Science, Engineering & Technology for Britain) Reception for Young Engineers - a gathering of some of the UK's brightest young engineers - at the House of Commons in London.

Katie chose to remain at Dundee after finishing her honours degree so that she could continue to develop the system, called E-Kardex, as she studies for her PhD in improving software development for safety critical systems. The research is being completed in close collaboration with the intensive care staff at Ninewells Hospital.

"The main focus was to create an interface that was intuitive, easy to use and which reduced the opportunities for the introduction of errors. We made sure that potential users from a range of disciplines were involved in the design from the beginning and continuously throughout the design process," Katie said.

"A clinical advisory team was also established consisting of a consultant in anaesthesia and intensive care, an intensive care fellow, principal clinical pharmacist of critical care, clinical pharmacist and ICU specialist liaison nurse."

Katie hopes that E-Kardex could eventually replace the current hand-written, paper-based system, Kardex, used at the hospital and in many other locations.

Katie said the added bonus of being based in the new School of Computing's Queen Mother Building also contributed to her decision to stay in Dundee.

"I really enjoy working in an exciting environment and there is also great support," she said.

Katie's supervisors, Prof Ian Ricketts and Dr Peter Gregor are agreed that Katie has made a fantastic start in getting all the disciplines gathered together and behind her research. It's also great to see a young researcher learning how to work across disciplines, a skill which is increasingly in demand.