How to Prevent Medication Errors

6/22/2007 1:53:22 AM - I recently attended the 4th Annual Excellence in Patient Safety conference in Jacksonville, FL. One of the speakers was Jane M. Mericle (RN, BSN, MHS), who presented the topic Lessons Learned from an Organizational Crisis; The Transplant Mismatch. She was on the surgical team at Duke Children's Hospital during this tragic incident (now she is the Clinical Operations Director), and she shared her experience with the attendees on what happened, and what the experience was like for her, both personally and professionally. It was an incident that you would not want anyone to have to go through. If you are unfamiliar with the event, here is the archived story available for you to read >>>

What does this have to do with INR Pro©? The incident reminded us of how easy it is to make one simple mistake, and without the right processes in place to prevent (or at least detect the problem), how that mistake can lead to great harm to patients, families, and those trying to treat them. HSS (the developers of INR Pro©) also provide process efficiency and defect prevention consulting for clinics and hospitals who want to identify ways to reduce the time to complete processes, and reduce the chance of errors occurring within those processes. Visit their website for more information >>>

With the typical warfarin patient in their 70's, the chance of mistakes increases on the patient side as well. Typically, medication dosing is the one area that is at most risk for a problem to occur. These mistakes can happen in a variety of ways, including forgetfulness, confusion, miscalculation, misread, etc.

To help prevent mistakes, INR Pro© has a summary page available to the patient, that shows how much to take each day of the week, the total dosage for the week, along with a visual of which pill to take.

Click to enlarge (remove pop-up blocker)

This report can be printed and mailed (or handed if on-site) to the patient, or they can login to their account through the patient portal, and access the report themselves.

Can you think of other ways to help mistake proof this process and information through INR Pro©? We are always looking for easier ways to present and display the dosing information, to minimize the risk to the patient (and you can never be too simplistic when it comes to patient safety). Feel free to contact us with ideas and/or suggestions…

If you would like to take advantage of these features with INR Pro, try our demo, or contact us for more information.