What do heparin, vancomycin, and insulin have in common? They are all high-alert medications, and the top three most consistently involved medications in events reported to Clarity PSO. As one of the nation's first and most trusted Patient Safety Organizations, we at Clarity PSO believe strongly in the importance of knowledge sharing in order to improve the quality of healthcare. For this reason, we regularly publish educational reports that focus on the risk-quality-safety (RQS) issues we have spotted through our incident reporting data collection and analyses. Each of these reports includes our findings on a given topic, and our recommendations on how to use knowledge to mitigate risk and improve patient safety surrounding that topic.
The latest report takes a deeper look at these delicate medications and uncovers the common themes and factors leading to reported incidents. From there we are able to offer some recommendations for improved safety practices with these and other such high-alert medications.