Despite efforts to reduce adverse drug events and improve patient safety—including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) in-depth undertaking to create policies, value-based purchasing programs, and other financial incentives aimed at preventing hospital ADEs—the problem perseveres. The result is an increase of about $136 billion in annual U.S. healthcare costs, much of which could be avoided.

Healthcare plans for the underserved markets, which include patients using Medicaid, Medicare Dual Advantage, or a healthcare exchange, offer limited options under the current pharmacy setup; there is also limited technology focusing on which patients are best served by which type of pharmacy.

Many studies have shown the benefits of certain medications for improving long-term outcomes in patients with chronic conditions. However, even when evidence-based recommendations are closely followed, there is a potential for adverse consequences because of the concurrent use of multiple medications.

Burnout already affected more than half of all physicians prior to the coronavirus pandemic, and it has only intensified among doctors and other healthcare workers in recent months. According to a recent survey, 65% of physicians indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased their feelings of burnout, as they feel overwhelmed and helpless in the face of the virus. And increasing burnout is widely reported in nursing, pharmacy, and nearly all other clinical areas.

The good news is that a new category of solutions—precision health insight networks (PHIN)—is emerging to help overcome these barriers and advance mainstream use of precision medicine. With the right infrastructure in place, health systems and health plans can scale delivery of precision care to achieve markedly better outcomes while significantly reducing healthcare costs.

The toolkit offers a core elements checklist for assessing policies and procedures, treatment recommendations in primary care taken from the CDC, and a flow chart that maps out considerations for surgical procedures. It also provides recent information on potential threats to antimicrobial stewardship due to COVID-19.

We know that overdoses quickened their pace in 2020, according to the CDC. The CDC identified over 81,000 drug overdoses in the 12 months ending in May 2020, the highest number ever in a 12-month period. And while those numbers were increasing prior to COVID-19, the latest data indicate the numbers accelerated further during the pandemic.

A host of additional snares have arisen during the past year, but Rose points out that, pandemic or not, patients struggle with three main medication adherence challenges: The patient never takes a prescribed medication at all. This can occur for a number of reasons such as misunderstanding their chronic diagnosis or the need for taking a medication.

It is evident that many underlying causes of flu vaccine–related errors could just as easily lead to errors associated with the new COVID-19 vaccines and the hundreds of millions of doses that will be given. It will be crucial for any healthcare provider who plans to stock and/or administer COVID-19 vaccines to learn from these prior vaccine-related errors, anticipate that similar errors could happen with the COVID-19 vaccines, and take the necessary steps to prepare their facilities and healthcare teams to mitigate the risk of vaccine-related errors.