BACKGROUND: Medco Health Solutions, Inc. conducted a project to reduce medication errors in its home-delivery service, which is composed of eight prescription-processing pharmacies, three dispensing pharmacies, and six call-center pharmacies.
IMPLEMENTING THE PROJECT: Medco uses the Six Sigma methodology to reduce process variation, establish procedures to monitor the effectiveness of medication safety programs, and determine when these efforts do not achieve performance goals. A team reviewed the processes in home-delivery pharmacy and suggested strategies to improve the data-collection and medication-dispensing practices. A variety of improvement activities were implemented, including a procedure for developing, reviewing, and enhancing sound-alike/look-alike (SALA) alerts and system enhancements to improve processing consistency across the pharmacies.
RESULTS: "External nonconformances" were reduced for several categories of medication errors, including wrong-drug selection (33%), wrong directions (49%), and SALA errors (69%). Control charts demonstrated evidence of sustained process improvement and actual reduction in specific medication error elements.
DISCUSSION: Establishing a continuous quality improvement process to ensure that medication errors are minimized is critical to any health care organization providing medication services.
}, year = {2005}, journal = {Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf}, volume = {31}, pages = {319-24}, month = {06/2005}, issn = {1553-7250}, language = {eng}, }