Perspectives

This piece describes patient safety risks when caring for frail older patients and summarizes potential approaches for clinicians to minimize this risk.

This piece explores the opioid epidemic in the United States, including factors that led to increased opioid prescribing, its adverse effects, and tactics to reduce opioid-related harm.

In this piece, a pharmacist highlights the importance of earning patient safety certification.

The toll of medical errors is often expressed in terms of mortality attributable to patient safety problems. In 2016, there was considerable debate regarding the number of patients who die due to medical errors. This Annual Perspective explores the methodological approaches to estimating mortality attributable to preventable adverse events and discusses the benefits and limitations of existing approaches.

Opioids are known to be high risk medications, and concerns about patient harm from prescription opioid misuse have been increasing in the United States. This Annual Perspective summarizes research published in 2016 that explored the extent of harm from their use, described problematic prescribing practices that likely contribute to adverse events, and demonstrated some promising practices to foster safer opioid use.

Computerized provider order entry is a cornerstone of patient safety efforts, and the increasingly widespread implementation of electronic health records has made it a standard practice in health care. This Annual Perspective summarizes novel findings and research directions in computerized provider order entry in 2015.

This piece discusses how environmental factors contribute to adverse events in health care and describes how evidence-based design principles can improve safety.

Clear health communication is increasingly recognized as essential for promoting patient safety. Yet according to a recent Joint Commission report, What Did the Doctor Say? Improving Health Literacy to Protect Patient Safety, communication problems among health care providers, patients, and families are common and a leading root cause of adverse outcomes. Addressing health literacy—the capacity of individuals to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions—has become a primary objective for many health systems in order to protect patients from harm.

Medication safety in hospitals depends on the successful execution of a complex system of scores of individual tasks that can be categorized into five stages: ordering or prescribing, preparing, dispensing, transcribing, and monitoring the patient's response. Many of these tasks lend themselves to technologic tools. Over the past 20 years, technology has played an increasingly larger role toward achieving the five rights of medication safety: getting the right dose of the right drug to the right patient using the right route and at the right time. While several of these technologies may incur significant upfront and maintenance costs, the net impact over time may be reduced overall institutional costs and improvements in work efficiency. Examples of technologic tools commonly seen in many hospitals today include computerized provider order entry (CPOE) with decision support and automatic dispensing carts, also known as medication dispensing robots. While outside the scope of this Perspective, it is important to emphasize that many nontechnologic interventions, such as clinical pharmacists on physician rounds, can be equally effective in improving medication safety.

Patients have three roles in improving patient safety: helping to ensure their own safety, working with health care organizations to improve safety at the organization and unit level, and advocating as citizens for public reporting and accountability of hospital and health system performance. The following case illustrates how patients can help ensure their own safety.

Pharmacists are comfortable participants in the patient safety movement in matters pertaining to prescriptions, medication systems, institutions, and national policy development. The very existence of the profession of pharmacy is rooted in the fundamental...

A decade ago, two tragic medical errors rocked one of the world’s great cancer hospitals, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, to its core. The errors led to considerable soul searching and, ultimately, a major change in institutional practices a...