Previous research has found that CancelRx can improve communication between electronic health record (EHR) systems and pharmacy dispensing systems and increase successful medication discontinuation. This interrupted time series analysis assessed the impact of CancelRx implementation on successful discontinuation of medications e-prescribed in ambulatory healthcare settings. After CancelRx implementation, the proportion of e-prescriptions sold after discontinuation in the EHR decreased from 8.0% to 1.4%.

Many healthcare professionals experienced adverse emotional and psychological outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic. This survey of 665 health system pharmacists found that pharmacists working in settings with higher levels of workplace wellness support were less likely to experience depression, anxiety, or burnout, and report higher levels of professional quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Community pharmacists are perhaps the last line of defense in preventing medication errors in the outpatient setting; therefore, ensuring a strong safety culture is critical. This review identified 11 studies reporting on safety culture using the AHRQ Community Pharmacy Survey on Patient Safety Culture. Pharmacists and pharmacy staff rated overall patient safety highly, but more than half identified workload as a concern.

Anesthesia provision is a high-risk practice. This guidance provides practical steps to ensure perioperative medication delivery is as safe as possible. This material recommends approaches for both clinicians and organizations to enable collaborative safety efforts in anesthesia, including prefilled syringes, standardization, and adherence to safe labeling practices.

Technology, such as barcode scanning, is a recognized method for improving medication safety, but poor design may lead to alert fatigue. This article describes a quality improvement project to reduce barcode-assisted medication preparation alerts in the hospital's pharmacies. More than 40% of alerts were identified as "barcode not recognized," such as packages containing more than one barcode. Problems associated with the highest volume of alerts were resolved with staff education, workflow changes, and changes.

Community pharmacies face unique challenges in ensuring patient safety. This commentary summarizes research on prescribing errors in community pharmacies and how a culture of safety in community pharmacies can drive improvements in prescribing safety.

Mandatory error reporting systems can help identify types, causes, and solutions to medication-related errors. More than 30,000 medication-related incidents were reported by community pharmacists to the Assurance and Improvement in Medication (AIMS) Program in Canada. Event type, severity, medication class, and method of detection are described. Only 60% of pharmacies submitted at least one report, indicating compliance with and participation in the AIMS Program remains low.

Community pharmacists play an important role in ensuring patient safety. This retrospective analysis of 18 outpatient pharmacy clinics evaluated pharmacist recommendations and impacts on medication-related safety. Researchers indicated that outpatient pharmacists were effective in resolving 82% of medication-related problems; 18% of these involved high-risk recommendations, such as medication interactions.

Community-based pharmacists have a critical role in ensuring medication safety in community settings. In this narrative review, the authors explored how collaboration between community-based pharmacists and primary care providers can improve medication safety. The most common collaboration strategy was medication review. The authors identified barriers to collaboration from both the primary care provider and pharmacist perspectives.

Provision of enteral nutrition (EN) is a specialized process requiring careful interdisciplinary teamwork. After discovering significant issues with ordering, administration, and documentation of EN, this health system updated its workflows to improve safety. EN therapies were added to the electronic medication administration record (MAR) and the barcoding system was updated. After one year, all EN orders were barcode scanned and nearly all were documented as given or included a reason why they were not given.

Remote delivery of care, such as telehealth and e-prescribing, increased sharply at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid review was conducted to determine the types and frequency of medication safety incidents associated with remote delivery of primary care prior to the pandemic. Fifteen articles were identified covering medication safety and e-prescribing; none of these studies associated medication safety and telehealth.

Tablet-splitting may introduce patient safety risks, such as unpredictable dosing. This systematic review and qualitative synthesis did not identify substantive evidence to support tablet-splitting concerns, with the exception of sustained-release tablets and use by older adults who may struggle to split tablets due to physical limitations.