Author: OurCrowd

Don’t read the next line if you’d rather not know the estimate for how many life-threatening errors occur in medical prescriptions each year. Around 80,000,000. Yes, that’s an estimate of 80 million. In the United States alone. How does it happen? Each year, doctors in the United States write about 4 billion prescriptions for medications, from common antibiotics for sinus infections, to long-term treatments like insulin, to anesthetics for emergency surgeries. Each prescription needs to be tailored to the requirements of the individual patient, taking into consideration age, weight, allergies, other current medications and additional factors; making what seems like a simple task into a multi-faceted decision-making process. In fact, the World Health Organization’s recommended procedures for issuing prescriptions instruct doctors to follow six steps, including performing an initial evaluation of the patient, selecting an appropriate drug, and monitoring the effects of that drug. The WHO also recommends using a computerized system to write prescriptions; as many of these systems include built-in software designed to detect mistakes. But despite these recommended procedures and computerized systems, 2% of prescriptions have errors...