Medication Harms Leading to Emergency Department Visits

Harms related to medications occur commonly. However, the frequency of emergency department (ED) visits and types of medications that lead to harm have not been reported recently. In a cross-sectional study, investigators used 3 years of surveillance data (2017–2019) on nearly 100,000 patients from 60 geographically diverse U.S. hospitals to calculate national estimates of ED visits for acute harms related to therapeutic and nontherapeutic medication use. The nontherapeutic category included misuse, abuse, self-harm, unintentional overdose, and unsupervised exposure in children.

Annually, more than 1 in 200 people had ED visits related to medication harm — approximately two thirds of such visits were due to therapeutic use, and one third wer…