FACTORS IN MEDICATION ERRORS ASSOCIATED WITH SEVERITY OF HARM

Patient safety is a widely-accepted concept throughout health care and society. Preventable medication errors impact patient safety, which affect patient clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and healthcare economics. Databases have been created to document adverse patient events and are used to collect, analyze, and trend data associated with medication errors. Data analytics involve a systematic analysis to glean lessons learned and minimize errors from recurring. In the United States, adverse event data are collected by healthcare facilities and voluntarily submitted to Patient Safety Organizations (PSO). Analyzing big datasets provides an opportunity to conduct data mining and develop predictive modeling to identify variables contributing to the causation and severity of harm associated with medication errors. This project explored the impact of facility type, patient demographics, and anonymity of reporting on severity of harm associated with medication errors. A retrospectives analysis was completed of a PSO database of over 340,000 events involving medication errors. Findings showed that medication errors were reported more frequently for both pediatric and adult patients at general acute care hospitals compared to academic healthcare facilities. Within the facilities, the volume of these errors occurred varied among pediatric and adult units. Higher severity of injury occurred with errors in critical care settings. Patient age impacted the severity of harm. Most importantly, this project identified the need to iv identify other key variables that could potentially minimize medication errors and the severity of harm resulting from adverse medication error events.