Why Prescription Pad 3.0

• You have yearned to get complete details of a drug especially when some near & dear is sick ?
• You had to strain to remember the safety profile of a drug ?
• You have diagnosed a disease but don't remember its recent treatment / drug dosage ?
• You wanted to see previous prescriptions / records of a patient which he has lost or has forgotten to bring ?
• Has the chemist dispensed wrong medicine due to ineligible writing in the prescription ?
• You depend on chemist's choice for a substitute in the prescription which he doesn't have because you fail to remember any alternative brand ?
• You have felt that their should be some way to avoid rewriting a frequently encountered disease's prescription to save time ?

Wrong Medicine Harms 1.5 m in US

Washington: Medication errors harm 1.5 million people and kill several thousand each year in the US, costing the nation at least $3.5 billion annually, the Institute of Medicine concluded in a report released on Thursday.

Drug errors are so widespread that hospital patients should expect to suffer one every day they remain hospitalised, although error rates vary by hospital and most do not lead to injury, the report concluded. The report, Preventing Medication Errors, cited the death of Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old mother of two and a health reporter for The Boston Globe, as a classic fatal drug mix-up. Lehman died in 1993 after a doctor mistakenly gave her four times the appropriate dose of a toxic drug to treat her breast cancer.

Recommendations to correct these problems include systemic changes like electronic prescribing and tips for patients to carry complete listings of their prescriptions to every doctor’s visit, the report said. The incidence of medication errors was surprising even to us, said J Lyle Bootman, dean of the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy.

The report is the fourth in a series done by the institute, the nation’s most prestigious medical advisory organisation.

The first report, To Err Is Human, was released in 1999 and caused a sensation when it estimated that medical errors of all sorts led to as many as 98,000 deaths each year — more than was caused by highway accidents and breast cancer combined. After the first report, health officials and hospital groups pledged reforms, but many of the most important efforts have been slow to take hold.

Drug computer-entry systems, which are supposed to ensure hospital patients get the right drugs at the right dose, are used in just 6% of the nation’s hospitals, said Charles B Inlander, president of the People’s Medical Society, a consumer advocacy group, and an author of the report released Thursday.

In case of any help please go to the help menu or contact us by e-mail. We would always be too happy to help you.

Electronic medical records can help ensure patients do not receive toxic drug combinations. The 1999 report urged widespread adoption of these systems. Thursday’s report called for all prescriptions to be written electronically by 2010. Just 3% of hospitals have electronic patient records and few doctors prescribe drugs electronically.