ADE

Article: The costs of adverse drug events in community hospitals

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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 … Read more

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

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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 … Read more

EMRs as a tool for patient safety.

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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

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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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