Health Insurance Daily

Medication Error Rate Is High, IOM Says

Medication errors are among the most common medical mistakes, harming 1.5 million people every year, reveals a new report from the Institute of Medicine.

The extra medical costs of treating drug-related injuries at hospitals alone amounts to $3.5 billion a year, and this estimate does not include lost wages and lost productivity, IOM reports.

On average, there is at least one medication error per hospital patient per day, although error rates vary widely across facilities. Not all errors lead to injury or death, but 1.5 million preventable injuries occur because of medication errors each year, IOM estimates. About 400,000 of those injuries occur in hospitals.

The report calls for all prescriptions to be written electronically by 2010. Paper-based prescribing is associated with high error rates, and electronic prescribing is safer because it eliminates problems with handwriting legibility and automatically alerts doctors to possible interactions, allergies and other problems, IOM concludes.

"The frequency of medication errors and preventable adverse drug events is cause for serious concern," says Linda Cronenwett, nursing professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "We need a comprehensive approach to reducing these errors."

Mark Merritt, president of the Pharmacy Care Management Association, calls the IOM recommendations "common-sense reforms that can improve all Americans' quality of life and save the health system tens of billions of dollars. A national, uniform e-prescribing standard will go a long way toward reducing medication errors and providing huge savings to the system."

Article published by BenefitNews, August 3rd, 2006.

posted by Mike @ 4:30 PM