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| Preventing medication errors — Can we afford not to make prescribing safer? | 2009-02-18 15:34:40 |
Preventing medication errors — Can we afford not to make prescribing safer?
Prescription drugs are now the second largest cost, after hospitals, in our health care system. In 2008, we spent $30 billion on prescriptions.
Is that the right amount to spend on drugs? Too much? Too little? How can we know?
What if you consider that problems with medication are a major cause of emergency room visits and hospital admissions, even death? Just among seniors, these problems are estimated to cost Canadian health care $11 billion a year.
Meanwhile, many Canadians cannot afford to fill their prescriptions.
How can we ensure that Canadians get the medications they need as safely, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible?
BC’s PharmaNet system offers one model for promoting the cost-effective use of drugs. Implemented in 1997, the system captures every prescription filled in the province in a central set of linked databases that combine patient data with information about drug safety. The system alerts the pharmacist to potential errors, drug interactions and/or allergies that a patient has, helping to prevent medication problems before people go home with their pills.
Emergency department teams in BC can use PharmaNet to get a drug history for incoming patients unable to give their own medical history. The same drug history provides instant clues about a patient’s pre-existing ailment, allowing health care workers to make a quicker, more accurate diagnosis.
A team-based approach to health care could potentially catch and prevent more medication errors by ensuring better communication among family doctors, specialists, hospitals, pharmacists, and patients.
Derek Jorgensen is a pharmacist working in an interprofessional team at the West Winds Primary Health Centre in Saskatoon. He explains what can happen if patients aren’t given proper instructions about their medications.
“If a patient goes into hospital for an angiogram, they might be put on two or three new medications,” he says. “But once they are discharged, it’s intended that they stop those new medications and resume their old regimen. But it’s very common for some folks to go home and take both medications – the old and the new – because no one told them what to do.”
Preventing such missteps would not only enhance a patient’s health, but also save the cost of treating problems that can result from poor communication.
In addition, a pharmacist is likely to be up-to-date on the latest developments in drug research, and so be able to flag for the patient when a new medication is more expensive, but no more effective, than an existing drug on the market.
What do you think?
1) Would you feel comfortable if your medical and prescription history was in a central database and available to all of your health care providers?
2) Why are we slow in adopting systems like PharmaNet across Canada?
3) If you work in health care, what impact would adopting a system like PharmaNet have on your work? On your patients or clients?
For more information:
· Watch videos from the Health Council of Canada
o Improving quality and efficiency through technology (BC’s PharmaNet)
o Improved safety through on-line prescribing (long-term care in Toronto)
· Learn more from the Health Council of Canada’s paper Value for Money: Making Canadian Health Care Stronger. See “Take with caution – prescription drugs and the elderly,” p. 32 and “Ways to save on the common cold,” p. 37.
Read The National Pharmaceuticals Strategy: A Prescription Unfilled — a Status Report and Commentary from the Health Council of Canada.