The seeds of an adverse drug interaction can be planted at any point in the care process, by any of the individuals involved. For instance, take a look at these common scenarios:
- A clinician, overwhelmed by meaningless alerts, overrides a warning and misses crucial information about a patient's drug allergy.
- A physician office's electronic health record (EHR) system enters the correct drug allergy information, but the pharmacist is unaware of the information.
- A young adult patient is allergic to an antibiotic, but doesn't know exactly what happened when he took the antibiotic as a child and he doesn't mention it when being treated for pneumonia.
The chances that any one of these situations may occur is increasing.