Jerry Fahrni

Tag: ADE

  • Article: The costs of adverse drug events in community hospitals

    The article below appeared in the March 2012 edition of Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety – yes, that’s a real journal. I couldn’t make this stuff up – Anyway, there’s nothing new here, we all know that ADEs are expensive. How expensive? Well, the bottom line is that “ADEs were associated with an increased adjusted cost of $3,420 and an adjusted increase in length of stay (LOS) of 3.15 days”. Depending on the number of ADEs your facility has you could easily use these numbers to justify the services of a pharmacist.

    The only problem with the information is that it’s from a 20-month period between January 2005 and August 2006. I hate to break it to you Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Aafety, but that makes the information all but useless. Interesting, but useless.

  • New study equals new opportunity for pharmacists – ADEs in the ED

    The February 2011 issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine has an article that reveals that patients that come through the emergency department (ED) secondary to an adverse drug event (ADE) “had a higher risk of spending additional days in the hospital per month and higher rate of outpatient health care encounters. The adjusted median monthly cost of care was 1.90 times higher (Can $325 versus $96; 95% CI 1.18 to 3.08).” In other words people that suffer and ADE create a burden on the healthcare system.

    The study was conducted in Canada, which by itself holds little significance. But I would wager a guess that most patients in Canada receive their prescriptions from a single primary care physician while patients in the US receive their medications from multiple physicians at the same time, i.e. patients in the US probably have a greater potential for ADEs.

    Medication reconciliation across the healthcare continuum is probably the best weapon we have in the fight against ADEs in the outpatient setting. And who can better manage a patient’s medication reconciliation than pharmacists? Uh, no one. Getting a pharmacist involved sounds like a good investment to me.

     

    Hohl CM, Nosyk B, Kuramoto L, et al. Outcomes of Emergency Department Patients Presenting With Adverse Drug Events. Annals of Emergency Medicine. 2011

  • EMRs as a tool for patient safety.

    A short jaunt over to the EMR and HIPPA weblog led me to an interesting article in Time written by Scott Haig, MD. While Dr. Haig touches on a couple of positive features of electronic medical records (EMRs), he like many physicians, focuses on the negatives. He concludes that “Doctors and patients live in a world of painful, pressing questions. The great physicians I’ve known seek answers through personal commitment to each patient and judgment born of practical experience — neither of which I have found in a machine.” I think he is missing the point of an EMR.
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  • Adverse Drug Event Occurences

    I’ve been working with a group here on a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)  for our bar coding medication administration project (called MAK –Medication Administration checKing by our vendor, Siemens Medical ). The benefit to implementing such as system is to significantly reduce the number of errors that occur during medication administration in hospitals each year.

    While researching the project I have come across several interesting facts. I would like to share them with you here.
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