admin 
Medical terminology transcription errors could be putting patients lives at risk, because of a growing number of cash-strapped hospitals sending medical notes abroad to save money, Unison warned today.
The union has compiled a dossier showing that 21 NHS trusts are piloting the outsourcing of confidential patient information to India and South Africa, which are then sent back to the UK and added to patients’ individual records.
Breast cancer, vehicle crashes, AIDS and medical error. Which do you think causes the most deaths per year? It may surprise you to learn that it is medical error.
A report issued by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System) concluded that up to 98,000 people die each year in the US as a result of preventable medical errors, including lack of medical terminology training. For comparison, fewer than 50,000 people died of Alzheimer’s disease and 17,000 died of illicit drug use in the same year.
It is claimed that potentially life-threatening medical terminology transcription errors are creeping into medical letters that are being transcribed by secretaries in India
It is also possible that the use of computer spell checkers is leading to some words being replaced by unlikely ones. In one example, the drug “Lansoprazole”, used to treat stomach ulcers, was transcribed as the popular holiday resort “Lanzarote”.