…when taken in inappropriate amounts.
The NYT reports on a recent AHRQ release that doesn’t tell us a lot that’s new – more hospital and ED visits are coded with medication side effects – a “50% increase since 2004”. The problem with the lay article is that it focuses on these issues as “medication errors” as some alarming decline in quality in U.S. healthcare. Part of the problem with this release is that it’s simply data – it’s not a study or a statistical analysis that attempts to control for other confounding influences – have the number of prescriptions for each of these classes gone up? What’s the average age of these patients presenting with errors (i.e., aging boomers)? There are a lot of other factors contributing to whether a medication results in an adverse effect, and they aren’t just “errors”. The ED data isn’t all that insightful, although it is interesting to see how it differs from the inpatient errors. The #1 culprit for the ED is “Other”, which is 261k compared to 118k opiate adverse events – which basically invalidates their data when most of your data points fall into an unknown category.