High-alert medications can cause serious patient harm if administered incorrectly. This article describes a quality improvement project to reduce medication errors involving high-alert sedative and analgesic medications in the intensive care unit (ICU) through use of protocolized and centralized smart intravenous infusion pump technology. Use of the protocolized software led to the interception of nearly 400 infusion-related programming errors.

Researchers analyzed medication errors occurring in the trauma service of a single university hospital in Spain to inform the development and implementation of a set of measures to improve the safety of the pharmacotherapeutic process. The Multidisciplinary Hospital Safety Group proposed improvement measures that intend to involve pharmacists in medication reconciliation, increase the use of medication reconciliation in the emergency and trauma departments, and incorporate protocols and alerts into the electronic prescribing system.

Use of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) is increasingly widespread. This systematic review found that while CPOE with clinical decision support reduced certain medication errors associated with prescribing, CPOE led to the introduction of new errors.

Nearly all of the medication errors in a Spanish hospital's computerized provider order entry system related to human factors issues involving the interaction between clinicians and the technology itself. These included previously identified problems associated with errors in free-text fields and errors resulting from autocompletion of partially entered orders.

In this study, failure mode and effect analysis—a prospective risk assessment tool—successfully identified actions that led to reductions in medication errors at a Spanish university hospital.