Harvard Research Shows New Technology Can Save Thousands of Lives a Year by Reducing Prescription Errors - Seite 2

"There is a need for innovative solutions to address the current prescription errors that result in substantial morbidity, mortality, and wasteful healthcare cost. MedAware's medication error detection system appears to have the ability to generate novel alerts that might otherwise be missed with existing clinical decision support systems", said Dr. Ronen Rozenblum (Project Co-investigator and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School).

The report found that MedAware's technology both identifies errors otherwise undetected and minimizes challenges associated with provider alert fatigue, and thus could reduce prescription errors with high accuracy, reducing medical costs and saving lives.

In the US healthcare market, more than $20bn is lost, annually, as a result of prescription errors and their consequences.  Beyond the financial ramifications, it's clear that errors in prescriptions can, and are, very damaging to patients, leading to prolonged illness, contraction of new disease and often death. Prescription errors are also found to be one of the main causes for extended lengths of stay and hospital readmissions.

Harvard Medical School chose to assess MedAware's technology, as they were particularly interested in evaluating the new types of alerts generated by the MedAware system, which are mostly unaddressed by current systems. Dr. Gordon Schiff, PI and Associate Professor Harvard Medical School said:

"Clinical decision support to alert for potential medication problems has a long way to go to achieve the goal of meaningfully and effectively alerting clinicians, without missing too many errors while at the time not over-alerting busy doctors (for errors that not important or relevant for that patient).

Our study of the MedAware system found that it was able to generate alerts based on screening for "outliers" some of which might be missed with existing CDS systems."

The study conducted by Harvard was carried out on almost 800,000 lives at the Brigham and Women's Hospital's (BWH), Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice (CPSRP); as well as making use of retrospective data from Partners HealthCare BWH and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) homegrown outpatient electronic health record (EHR).