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Patient Safety
- Between 1.5%-4.0% prescriptions are in error with serious
patient risk (67,500 to 180,000 errors)
- Adverse drug events occur in 5%-18% of ambulatory patients
- More than 8.8 million adverse drug events (ADEs) occur
each year in ambulatory care, of which over 3 million are
preventable
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Quality of Care
- Compliance
- 1.1 billion scripts are never filled
- Patient satisfaction is declining
- Cost of errors: $2 billion / year
The American
Hospital Association lists the following as some common
types of medication errors:
- Incomplete patient
information (not knowing about patients' allergies, other
medicines they are taking, previous diagnoses, and lab results,
for example)
- Unavailable drug
information (such as lack of up-to-date warnings)
- Miscommunication
of drug orders, which can involve poor handwriting, confusion
between drugs
with similar names, misuse of zeroes and decimal points,
confusion of metric and other dosing units, and inappropriate
abbreviations
- Lack of appropriate
labeling as a drug is prepared and repackaged into smaller
units
- Environmental
factors, such as lighting, heat, noise, and interruptions,
that can distract health professionals from their medical
tasks
- Indecipherable
or unclear prescriptions may result in more than 150 million
calls from pharmacists to physicians asking for clarification
- The number of
prescription-related telephone calls annually is estimated
at 900 million
- Almost 30% of
prescriptions require pharmacy callbacks
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