Editorial: Drug errors cost billions

Saturday, July 29, 2006 | 7:54 a.m.

A new report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has concluded that medication errors are surprisingly common and costly in this country. The study included a sobering thought: There are at least 1.5 million medication errors each year in which U.S. patients are hurt or even killed, perhaps many more.

Not all medication errors lead to injury, but patients can expect to suffer at least one error on average each day they are in the hospital, the report said. The financial costs are high: Hospitals face roughly $3.5 billion in extra costs due to medication errors, and it costs another $887 million to treat nonhospitalized Medicare enrollees who are 65 and older.

The striking theme of the report is that the errors are quite preventable. Some fundamental change is required of everyone involved - doctors, pharmacists, government agencies, hospitals and patients, the report said. The report makes some excellent recommendations, starting with a simple call for more communication. Patients and their doctors and pharmacists must talk - and listen - more to each other at every step of treatment, the report said.

Patients should take responsibility to learn more about their medications, double-check their prescriptions, and to better monitor their drug-taking with careful records. Doctors, nurses and pharmacists must tell patients more about how the drugs will affect them, and be more honest after errors are made.

The report recommended a government-drug industry partnership aimed at improving drug "nomenclature" to make drug names, abbreviations and acronyms clearer to avoid confusion.

The report also sensibly recommends that doctors and pharmacists take advantage of new technologies to keep abreast of a flood of new information available on the Internet about medications. And the report recommends that prescribers and pharmacies replace error-causing hand-scrawled prescriptions with electronic versions by 2010. The legible "e-prescriptions" also would make it easier for prescribers to check patient drug allergies and monitor doses. The e-prescriptions can follow patients, from hospitals to doctors or from nursing homes to pharmacies, which reduces "hand-off errors," the report noted.

In a high-tech age of amazing medical and medicinal breakthroughs, patient recoveries should not be complicated by bad handwriting and outdated methods of drug delivery.