A Pharmacist-Led Intervention Reduces Medication Errors in Primary Care

Errors in prescribing and monitoring medications commonly occur in primary care and are not generally reduced with simple pharmacist-based safety programs. To examine a more complex pharmacist-led intervention, U.K. investigators conducted a randomized trial among 72 primary care practices (480,000 patients) using electronic medical records.

At baseline, all the practices received computerized patient-level feedback on 11 common prescribing and monitoring errors, as well as brief written educational materials on each type of error. Half the practices then received a more complex 12-week intervention, in which pharmacists reviewed computerized feedback in meetings with both the full practice teams and individual physicians, recalled patients …