Pharmacists on Rounding Teams Reduce Preventable Adverse Drug Events in Hospital General Medicine Units

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Abstract
MEDICATION ERRORS occur more frequently than expected. Lazarou et al1 stated that fatal adverse drug events (ADEs) were the sixth leading cause of death in the United Stated in 1994, with 10.9% of all hospital patients experiencing some adverse drug reaction and 2.1% of admissions resulting in serious events. A systems solution that looks at processes rather than at individual behavior is proposed as a viable approach to address the medication error problem.2-4 When processes are examined, a common root cause of medication errors occurs at the time when decisions about therapy are made.5,6 Failure to obtain sufficient information about the patient or about the pharmaceutical agent has contributed to medication errors. Thus, modifying the rounding process by adding the expertise of a pharmacist is proposed as a systems improvement to address the medication error problem.