Medication Administration Failure

As mentioned above, different strategies have been implemented to prevent the unfavorable effects of medical errors, particularly mistakes in medication administration. Because of medication errors, the patients’ mortality went up, which costs the U.S. healthcare systems billions of dollars yearly. It was also reported that every year, there are approximately 450 000 unfavorable medication circumstances of which 25 percent could have been prevented, that caused an injury to the patient. Therefore, other than the CDSS/CPOE implementation, the following systems were being used to aid in the improvement of the medication administration efficiency: intravenous infusion pumps with preprogrammed drug information, barcode-assisted medication administration
(BCMA) systems, electronic medication administration records (eMARs), and the mobile connection integrated with the hospital’s information systems (Seibert, Maddox, Flynn, & Williams, 2014). Moreover, studies also showed that combining the eMAR and the BCMA systems created efficiency by lowering the total number of unfavorable medication events and mistakes in transcribing medications. The eMAR was developed for nurses and pharmacists to have a better exchange of information, whereas the BCMA system was created to minimize mistakes in administration. The eMAR program is a system that schedules and documents medication and its administration, but prior to reaching this phase, it started with the clinician’s completing a medication order then the pharmacy will disburse the medication. Even though about one-third of unfavorable medication events happened during the order entry, the other 3rd of unfavorable medical events happened when administering the medication which could create more injury to the patient. Therefore, studies were conducted to determine the efficiency of the eMAR and the BCMA systems use. The study revealed that after implementing the eMAR and the BCMA systems, there was a 20 percent drop in the rate of medication errors wherein over half of this drop was due to a decrease in errors in transcription (Truitt, Thompson, Blazey-Martin, NiSai, & Salem, 2016). On the other hand, the rate of a medication accuracy was noted to be improved after the BCMA-eMAR used in a research study of two hospitals. Furthermore, the same study showed a lower number of avoidable mistakes after the BCMA-EMAR systems were implemented (Seibert et al., 2014).