Medication Error Facts:
The Case for Improved IV Medication Safety

  • More people die in a given year as a result of medical errors than from motor vehicle accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516).1
     
  • Medication errors alone, occurring either in or out of the hospital, are estimated to account for 7,000 deaths annually.2
     
  • Adverse drug events cause more than 770,000 injuries and deaths each year and cost up to $5.6 million per hospital.3
     
  • Patients who suffered unintended drug events remained in the hospital an average of 8 to 12 days longer than patients who did not experience such mistakes. These added days mean their hospital stays cost $16,000 to $24,000 more.4
     
  • One recent study conducted at two prestigious teaching hospitals found that about two out of every 100 admissions experienced a preventable adverse drug reaction event resulting in average increased hospital costs of $4,700 per admission or $2.8 million annually for a 700-bed teaching hospital.5
     
  • Two large studies, one conducted in Colorado and Utah and the other in New York, found that adverse events occurred in 2.9 and 3.7 percent of hospitalizations, respectively.6
     
  • Preventable Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) cost the healthcare system $2 billion annually.7
     
  • Infusion devices account for up to 35% of all medication errors that result in significant harm (Class 4 and 5). The most common errors are manually programming incorrect infusion parameters, failure to ensure the right patient receives the right medication, and tampering of infusion parameters by unauthorized users.8
     
  • The most common error is manually programming infusion parameters into the device (e.g. rate, drug, dose, etc.).9
     
  • "You've got health-care professionals who are in a hurry, seeing many, many patients. This [bar codes on packaging of prescription medicines] allows them to rely on a computer to make sure they're giving the right amount of medicine or that they don't give the wrong medicine." Source: Assistant U.S. Health Secretary Bobby Jindal.10
     

  1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (National Center for Health Statistics). Births and Deaths: Preliminary Data for 1998. National Vital Statistics Reports. 47(25):6, 1999.
  2. Increase in US Medication-Error Deaths between 1983 and 1993. The Lancet, 351:643-44, 1998.
  3. Agency for Health Research and Quality, 2001.
  4. Agency for Health Research and Quality, 2001.
  5. The Costs of Adverse Drug Events in Hospitalized Patients – JAMA, 277:307-311, 1997.
  6. Brennan, Troyen A.; Leape, Lucian L.; Laird, Nan M., et al. Incidence of adverse events and negligence in hospitalized patients: Results of the Harvard Medical Practice Study I. N Engl J Med. 324:370–376, 1991.
  7. Institute of Medicine (IOM), To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System, 2000.
  8. Data on file, B.Braun Medical Inc.
  9. Drug Pump's Deadly Trail, Tallahassee Democrat, May 28, 2002.
  10. Assistant U.S. Health Secretary Bobby Jindal in response to the U.S. federal government's proposal that bar codes be required on the packaging of all hospital-administered prescription medicines to help prevent deadly drug errors.




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