John McMillen from Medical Memory and Dr. Jill Paslier, a Specialty Pharmacy Expert in clinical and operational program development, discuss the importance of actively monitoring and surveilling medication use processes to prevent patient harm. They emphasized the need for robust medication error surveillance programs, targeting high-risk medications, and implementing active monitoring, data analysis, and patient counseling. They also highlighted the significance of a non-punitive culture for reporting errors and the role of medication safety officers and quality and safety teams in implementing medication error surveillance programs.

Stop: Passive waiting for errors to be discovered instead of actively monitoring for potential incidents.

Start: Focus on proactively identifying medication errors and developing a robust surveillance program. There's a need for health systems to continue to track errors and ensure a non-punitive culture for those who make and report errors.

Leverage technology.

Continue: Using a multidisciplinary team, including pharmacists, nurses and quality and safety professionals to identify and address medication errors to improve patient safety