1.5 million…

That's how many Americans are harmed every year because of medication errors, according to the latest Institute of Medicine report. This same institute made the number 98,000 infamous a few years ago. (It’s the number of hospital patients killed every year by medical mistakes in the US.)

These mistakes are happening in hospitals as well as clinics and pharmacies. And not only are they costing quality of life (or just lives), they’re costing taxpayers a staggering $3.5 billion per year.

In the NPR report titled “Drug Errors Still Common,” commentator Richard Knox speaks about computerized prescribing systems, which are better at checking for double-entries of the same drug, harmful interactions, and unique adverse effects than people are. It also elimates the problem of reading of terrible handwriting, which leads to errors too.

Sadly it took high-profile tragedies to get the ball moving on e-prescribing:

It was at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, “almost a dozen years ago, that two medication errors shook the medical world. A chemotherapy overdose killed Betsey Lehman, a Boston Globe health columnist, and damaged the heart of schoolteacher Maureen Bateman.”

“That episode is credited by many as launching the error-prevention movement. It was mentioned in the first sentence of the 2000 Institute of Medicine report and is featured again in the new report.”

In addition to e-prescribing, there’s bar-coding. I personally see both in use at the VA.

Michael Cohen is another author of the new report. He's president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices. He says bar-coding every dose of drug and matching it to a code on patients' wristbands can also prevent mistakes. But Cohen says only one hospital in seven uses bar-coding.

Cohen recently visited a hospital that does.

"This was interesting," he says. "In a one-month period, there were 74 times when a nurse walked into the wrong patient's room, scanned the patient's wrist band, and was alerted to the fact that they were not with the right patient. That's an amazing number of people that may have gotten the drug that wasn't intended for them!"

The IOM wants all US hospitals to have e-prescribing systems in place by 2010. But hospital execs will move when they have financial incentives to do so, or have to deal with tragic deaths on their watch. Let's hope the former becomes the driver of change in all cases before the latter happens.