WASHINGTON – Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Bob Graham, D-Fla., on Thursday introduced legislation they said would reduce the number of medical errors by helping hospitals to improve their drug screening equipment.

“We are here simply to reduce the loss of lives as a result of medical errors,” Snowe said. “Fact of the matter is we have the best health care system, but at the same time we have seen some of the tragic results because mistakes do happen.”

The Medical Error Prevention Act of 2001 would provide $93 million a year to medical hospitals and $4 million annually to skilled nursing homes to help them purchase and install the necessary computer equipment and provide education and training for their staffs.

Graham said the bill would authorize the money from the Medicare trust fund to be distributed by the U.S. Health and Human Services Department as grants to hospitals and skilled nursing homes.

Priority would be given to those health care facilities that have the greatest number of Medicare and Medicaid patients, Graham said, because “they also tend to be the hospitals which are in the greatest economic distress, and also because we are using the Medicare trust fund as a means of financing these grants.” The grant recipients would choose the systems they feel would be most effective.

According to a 1999 Institute of Medicine report, medication errors contribute to 7,000 deaths annually. Medical errors also result in about 250,000 nonfatal injuries each year, according to a Harvard Medical Practice Study.

“The consequences have been real, regardless of age or income or gender or race,” Snowe said. “It could happen to anyone.”

“Our legislation is necessary because as a nation we face a patient safety problem,” Graham said. “The good news is, we have a solution to that problem. We have the technological ability to dramatically reduce medication errors and save lives.”

The American Medical Association reported that the newly developed information systems could reduce serious medication errors by 55 percent.

“The medical error problem is primarily a system problem, not a people problem,” said Dr. David Bates, chief of general medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “If we don’t improve our systems in health care, more injuries will occur.”

Technology exists now that could dramatically reduce the frequency of medication errors, according to Bates. One successful example is the Computer Physician Order Entry.

CPOE software can prevent medication errors by checking physicians’ orders for problems like overly high doses and drug allergies, according to the doctor.

“These systems are not easy to implement,” Bates said. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the cost of developing and implementing CPOE was about $1.9 million, with $500,000 in annual maintenance costs.

“But the rewards are great and they represent a powerful tool for change, because most things that happen in hospitals occur as a result of orders. Our research has indicated that these systems can prevent up to 88 percent of serious medication errors,” he said.

Bates added that many hospitals and nursing homes would like to implement this and other technologies that would improve the safety of their patients but that because of the costs only 15 percent of hospitals nationwide use CPOE.

That is about to change if Snowe and Graham have their way. “The goal is to have 25 percent of America’s hospitals and 25 percent of our skilled nursing facilities implementing this legislation in the next decade,” the senators said.

“We want to help nursing facilities and hospitals to be able to integrate these systems so that we can improve the quality of our health care system, and that is what this legislation is all about,” Snowe said.

“This bill is good news,” said David Hartley, president of the Maine Rural Health Association. “I am optimistic that grants go directly to the facilities so money can be put to good use quickly.”

“It is definitely true that medical errors cause poor health outcomes,” Hartley said. “Small rural hospitals and nursing homes have greater needs in this area because they don’t have as much money. I sincerely hope they will get their fair share of the grants because they really have a tough time.”