The ACR works for the day when all medical errors are eliminated and welcomes input from all medical organizations. However, the recent United States Pharmacopeia (USP) study regarding medication error rates in medical imaging facilities is incomplete, inaccurate, may unnecessarily alarm patients, and may cause many patients who require imaging care to mistakenly avoid getting it.
More than 2.5 billion imaging procedures were conducted during the 5 year (2000-2004) USP study. Even taken at face value, the 2,030 errors cited in the report, of which nearly half were incorrectly attributed to radiology facilities, represent an error rate of .00008%. This rate is more than 3,700 times better than the lowest hospitalwide medication error rate (.3%) cited by a recent Institute of Medicine report on this issue.(1,2)
"Americans are many times more likely to be struck by lightning than experience any of the errors cited in the USP report.(3) There is nothing in this study, or any other I am aware of, to support claims of systemic medication handling problems inherent or unique to radiology facilities. To make these unsupported claims at a time when medical imaging care is increasingly replacing more costly and invasive techniques is not only inaccurate but irresponsible," said James P. Borgstede, MD, FACR, chair of the American College of Radiology Board of Chancellors.
The USP report is deeply flawed and misleading. Cardiac catheterization labs are listed as the areas where the highest percentage (40%) of medication errors cited in the report occurred. The report attributes all 823 errors (nearly half of the total cited) incurred in these labs to "radiology." While interventional radiology is a growing subspecialty of radiology, and the number of these procedures performed by radiologists is increasing, radiologists currently perform less than 1% of cardiac catheterization procedures nationwide.