ARTICLE: Mitigating medical mistakes

Journal Record, The (Oklahoma City),  Feb 5, 2001

Health care organizations are calling for immediate action to make health delivery safer in light of a recent revelation that medical errors kill 98,000 U.S. citizens each year.

That number should not be considered an indictment against the health care industry, after all, tens of millions of U.S. citizens visit hospitals, clinics and physicians' offices each year. With such a demand for health care, and with health care professionals normally working at maximum effort, mistakes can occur. With the current level of medical knowledge, a generally accepted procedure or prescription, which works for nearly all humans, may be deadly for a specific individual.

At issue is not who do we blame, but how do we improve the system. This is where advanced technology can be the proper tool, applied at many levels of health care.

Proper training for those in the health delivery professions is the first line of defense against such egregious statistics. However, the accountability required to ensure that adequate training has occurred can be daunting to large employers of health care professionals and to the institutions providing the training.

There is an Oklahoma company that is addressing this issue head on, and in doing so, creating a much-needed service to the health care industry and to the health care consumer.

Cehub.com and its owner Annette Abbott have come to the rescue in the form of an online database that provides the continuing education status of medical personnel.

Licensing boards assume the responsibility of ensuring that medical personnel attain a high level of competency. Competency is accomplished through continuing education delivered in any number of ways, including online, in classrooms, by correspondence and seminars and conferences.

But who keeps count to make certain no health care professional slips through the cracks and as a result, slips in the required level of competency? This question of certification is the founding basis for cehub.com, according to Abbott.

At issue are the thousands of hours of training that is required, but often is not captured in the records keeping process. Why are such records important?

Corporate offices of health care providers must be confident their medical staff is properly trained and properly certified to provide the high level of proficiency required to resolve the issue of nearly 100,000 U.S. citizens dying each year as the result of medical mishaps.

Cehub too can be a source of information for consumers who should know before they enter a hospital or seek medical care from a clinic, that health care professionals they encounter will be in perfect compliance with continuing education requirements.

As an added feature of their online records keeping, cehub is developing online training for health care delivery personnel to round out their list of services to their customers.

Abbott's message to potential customers is, "Our mission is to be the premier `full service' destination for people looking to improve their skills, track their progress and maintain their professional certifications and licenses."

The company's primary focus today is to provide the continuing education industry a tool that will give all segments of this industry the ability to track and auto-update transcripts, reports, records and accreditation.

The "CE" in the name cehub.com stands for continuing education. The "hub" is meant to reflect the company's position as the core set of applications, which allow the individual student to interact electronically with all of the diverse entities involved in the continuing education process.

According to Abbott, her company provides hospitals and others the ability to show customers the facility is safe and in perfect compliance with continuing education requirements. The ultimate benefit is a better-trained quality team of health care professionals who are the first line of defense against medical mistakes.

H. Randall Goldsmith is executive director of the Oklahoma Technology Commercialization Center, operated by the Oklahoma Technology Development Corp., a private, not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the creation of additional high-technology businesses in the state of Oklahoma. The center is operated under contract with the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology and is funded with state appropriations.

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