Health News

Report: Drug Errors Injure 1.5 Million

July 20, 2006 -- About 1.5 million Americans are injured each year because of errors in their medications, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report concluded Thursday.

The report estimates that such errors in hospitals alone cost the health system well over $3.5 billion per year. That does not include errors made at doctors' offices, pharmacies, long-term care facilities, and in patients' own homes.

The report says on average a hospital patient is subjected to at least one medication error per day.

Experts said that dangerous interactions between drugs probably account for the majority of medication mistakes. But errors and misinterpretations occur at any of dozens of points between a drug's manufacture and when a patient receives treatment.

Preventable Errors

"Many of these errors are preventable," said J. Lyle Bootman, PhD, who chaired the panel issuing the report.

The report calls on Congress to drastically boost funding for research into the causes of medication errors, noting that only a few million dollars annually are spent on studies now. A 1999 Institute of Medicine report estimated that more than 7,000 Americans are killed by medication mistakes each year.

"We think that medication errors deserve a really serious commitment. We need to rethink our priorities," said Albert W. Wu, MD, an IOM panel member who is also professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md.

U.S. doctors now prescribe more than 14,000 drugs, not including the huge range of over-the-counter medications, supplements, and herbal remedies in many Americans' medicine cabinets. The report called for policy makers to speed the development of electronic systems to help catch prescribing mistakes and alert doctors to potential drug interactions.

"It's virtually impossible to be able to track that any more by yourself," Wilson D. Pace, MD, a professor of family medicine at the University of Colorado and a panel member, said of the number of drugs on the U.S. market.

Even well-informed physicians and pharmacists face hurdles when ordering drugs. The FDA is trying to cut down on drug names that sound or look alike. Pharmacists still have to contend with notoriously bad doctors' handwriting, and patients frequently don't inform their doctors about all the drugs they're taking.