Reducing Medication Errors: Rethinking Prescribing Drugs in Standardized Units over Quantities of Ingredients

Abstract

The prescribers need to memorize the dose and strength of thousands of drugs often with similar sounding names but differing actions, by their weight (strengths), which could lead to significant errors in medication. When prescribing, instead of using amounts in milligrams, a "standard unit" -a universal standard adult dose unit-concept can be employed to minimize such instances of erroneous recollection of dosages. Prescribers would not essentially need to know the composition and actual amount of active pharmaceutical ingredients in prescribed drugs if such a standardized unit prescribing system could be adopted. They could simply resort to prescribing the required number of units of medication instead. The standard adult dose of any drug could be referred to as one adult unit regardless of the amounts by weight. Only drug manufacturers and research scientists would need to know the actual strengths of the medications in milligrams of what would be referred to as a standard adult unit. Implementation of the unit system, along with the incorporation of electronic prescribing, could allow for simple data entry, and easier corrections for lean body weight/BMI, renal function, age, pregnancy, etc., leading to improvements in patient safety and optimal dosage achieved, eliminating difficult calculations. Moreover, a parallel paediatric unit could also be developed. The conceptual study to arouse an interest cannot address all issues and details relating to actual implementations.