Electronic drug alert program reduces adverse events

An electronic drug safety alert program within an accountable care organization (ACO) can go a long way regarding patient safety, according to a study conducted by the clinical pharmacy services department at Marshfield Clinic.

The Marshfield, Wisc. organization designed a drug safety alert program (DSP) to provide clinicians prescribing drugs with timely and clinically meaningful medication safety information through the EHR that has an electronic prescribing platform.

The clinic implemented an alert system in EHRs that presents clinicians with up-to-date drug information to help reduce the number of drug-related adverse events. To avoid alert fatigue, the system packages alerts in a report that aggregates all patients who have been prescribed a specific medication rather than sending alerts on individual patients. This ensures that providers are only given the information they need and encourages them to integrate the alerts into their care plans.  

The first year of the DSAP program targeted six medication safety concerns, according to the article published in the Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy. In total, approximately 10,000 potential adverse events were identified and approximately 8,000 were resolved by changing prescriptions after the EHR issued an alert.

"A goal of this project was to partner with the prescriber in the overall care of the patient," said Sara Griesbach, PharmD, director of clinical pharmacy services at Marshfield Clinic. "This program was created to identify drug alerts with potential to impact a large patient population that may require intervention to decrease the risk for adverse drug events."