The Wall Street Journal‘s Laura Landro spotlighted a new national network designed to send e-mail alerts to as many as 55,000 pharmacists.
The network is designed to alert pharmacists of dangerous and life-threatening errors as well as to educate them on how to prevent those specific errors from also occurring in their own respective practices. The system is intended to help the same errors from being repeated time after time across the country.
Photo by jypsygen via Flickr.Landro wrote that “Medication errors cause at least one death every day and injure approximately 1.3 million people annually in the United States,” and added that there are some indications that the weakening economy has had a negative impact on medication safety.
Here’s Landro explaining the new network:
The non-profit Institute for Safe Medication Practices, which is certified by the federal government to collect error reports and other information about quality breaches, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists are launching a new National Alert Network for Serious Medication Errors. The network, which was unveiled last month, will be used to send email alerts to 35,000 pharmacists working in hospitals and health systems, as well as physicians and nurses, when a dangerous or life-threatening error is reported to ISMP. The two organizations are also in discussions to extend the network to as many as 26 other organizations that promote safe medication use. The hope is that widely spreading the word about such errors will cause doctors and pharmacists to be more cautious—and ultimately prevent future mix-ups. Relevant alerts will also be sent to 20,000 drugstore pharmacists.
Landro also mentioned ISMP’s consumer med safety alert portal and the FDA’s consumer-focused error reporting tool. She also goes into greater detail as to how drug mishaps happen, and into what can be done to prevent them.
