A single digital prescribing record across healthcare settings in England could reduce medication errors by between 10% and 50%, leading to between 18,000 and 913,000 fewer errors, between 3,000 and 15,800 fewer people experiencing harm and saving four to 22 lives annually, researchers have suggested.

An integrated system has the potential to save time for healthcare professionals, improve patient experience and quality of care, lead to quicker discharge and enhance cross-organisational medicine optimisation, they added.

Using a probabilistic mathematical model, the University of Manchester and the University of Liverpool researchers calculated the number of transition medication errors that would be undetected by standard medicines reconciliation based on published literature. They scaled it up based on the annual number of hospital admissions.

To calculate the possible impact of a single digital prescribing record on patient safety, they conducted a literature review to determine the rate at which medication errors lead to harm. This was then compared to the total number of reported medication errors to estimate the size of the burden. By examining how effective interoperable prescription systems were from previous studies, it was then possible to calculate how effective the system would be in reducing harm.

The findings show that around 1.8 million medication errors occur annually at hospital transitions in England, affecting approximately 380,000 patient episodes. The impact of these errors was significant, with around 31,500 patients suffering harm, some 36,500 additional bed days of inpatient care being required at a cost of around £17.8m and more than 40 deaths.

The researchers estimated that a single digital prescribing record could reduce medication errors by between 10% and 50%, leading to between 18,000 and 913,000 fewer errors, between 3,000 and 15,800 fewer people experiencing harm and saving four to 22 lives annually.

They concluded that the results provided vital safety and economic evidence for the case to adopt interoperable prescription information systems to support patient safety and reduce medication errors.

Unifying health and care records into one digital health record could help community pharmacies deliver more screening, vaccination, chronic condition management and acute care, major UK think tank the Tony Blair Institute recently suggested.

This article first appeared on our sister title Hospital Pharmacy Europe.