The launch of the National Alert Network for Serious Medication Errors (NAN) was announced at the opening session of the 44th American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition. ASHP is partnering with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices to develop the alert system in an effort to prevent dangerous and repeated medication errors.
The system will be triggered when a seriously harmful or potentially seriously harmful error has occurred. The alert will include a description of the error and recommendations to prevent the same error in the future. ASHP will disseminate e-mail alerts to its network of nearly 35,000 health-system pharmacists and other healthcare practitioners. The event-specific information included in the alerts will be obtained from voluntary reports, news reports, and other channels. The alerts will be archived and posted on the ASHP website (www.ashp.org/iv-summit).
Keynote speaker Dennis Quaid expressed his support for NAN in his address. Quaid became an advocate for systems changes in hospitals to protect patients from medication errors when his infant twins received near-fatal overdoses of heparin. That experience led to the establishment of The Quaid Foundation whose mission is to help minimize the impact of human error in patient care.