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United States Pharmacopeia [USP]
Staff Reporters
After examining records submitted by 870 hospitals to MEDMARX, a database run by the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), a new report finds that 1.4 percent of mistakes resulted in patient harm, including seven errors that may have caused or contributed to death. The study implicated 1,470 different drugs in errors associated with brand or generic names that looked or sounded similar. The USP compiled an even longer list of 3,170 name-pairs that looked or sounded alike.
Assessment
Medication mix-ups doubled since 2004 driven largely by a troubling proliferation of prescription drugs with confusingly similar names. The 2008 total is nearly double the 1,750 pairs that USP identified in the 2004 study.
Conclusion
And so, how is this possible with bar-coding, RFID tags, eMRs, CPOEs and related modern inventory management technologies?
Related info: www.HealthcareFinancials.com
Terms: www.HealthDictionarySeries.com
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Filed under: Drugs and Pharma | Tagged: Big Pharma and Drugs |
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Generic Drugs
Did you know that according to the Wall street Journal, Wal-Mart claims that its $4 generics program has saved consumers $1 billion as of March 10, 2008?
The company said the $4 drugs now account for 40 percent of all prescriptions filled at its stores, and that nearly 30 percent of the cheap prescriptions are purchased without insurance.
Wal-Mart breaks down the program by state, with the top savers being Texas ($132,628,224), Florida ($72,443,467) and North Carolina ($48,241,530).
The baseline figures used to calculate total savings are the average Wal-Mart price of each generic drug before the program launched, while the calculations don’t include the prices of branded – and much more expensive – drugs.
This is good news for concierge medical practices and high-deductible health insurance plans, too. Any comments?
-Hope
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