The authors retrospectively reviewed over 99,000 medication errors reported to the US National Poison Data Systems from 2000 to 2017 in order to characterize errors attributed to healthcare professionals or occurring in a healthcare facility. Antibiotics, pain medicines, and sedatives/hypnotics were the most common medication types involved in these errors, and the most common error types involved the wrong medication, incorrect dose and incorrect administration route.

Patient and family medication administration mistakes can result in medication errors at home. This commentary describes the problem of "pill dumping," where patients combine their daily medicines into a spare vial. However, patients are at risk for mistakenly taking a vial of a single medication instead of their pill-dump vial and inadvertently overdosing. The authors suggest medication counseling and use of daily pill boxes as tactics to prevent this type of error.

This study of poison center data found that the precise reasons for fatality were difficult to ascertain in one-third of cases despite fairly good consistency between information from coded data and abstract narratives.

This study discovered that 33% of patients being treated with acetylcysteine for an acetaminophen overdose were involved in a medication error.