We are embarking on a study evaluating a tool that assesses the risk of a prescribing error associated with a particular medication - your help is needed for face validation efforts. I'm happy to share the tool (it's in an Excel sheet) and any acknowledgements according to contributions.

Since the majority of medication errors fall into the administering or prescribing parts of the medication use process, we are isolating a portion of the prescribing component to see if there is a way to quantify risk according to the medication. We developed a modified FMEA tool to be applied to a single medication ordering event, and use the prescribing and drug elements present to generate objective values for Severity, Probability, and Discoverability to generate a Prescribing Risk Score. This score, we hypothesize, will correlate well with the risk of making an error while prescribing.

I am hoping some of you may be interested in this work and if so, would like to volunteer as part of an adhoc panel of experts to provide feedback on the face validity of the tool. Do the risk numbers appear to correlate with the prescribing errors you see in your institution? I anticipate your keen insights will help refine the tool's accuracy. If the study is successful, we may have a relatively simple and easy-to-use tool that can be applied to assess the prescribing risk of new medications, which in turn can inform appropriate risk-mitigation strategies.

Please e-mail me at mtvanorn@sentara.com if interested in participating. I look forward to productive dialogue.

Kindest Regards,

Michael Van Ornum
Medication Safety Clinical Pharmacist