Brace yourself for upcoming news reports on how a new, federally funded initiative from a pharmacists’ group could save 98,000 lives a year. Those reports will be wrong, because a publicist for that group misunderstood statistics and news outlets will still take him at his word, because, well, nobody can be troubled to check facts anymore.
Also, the publicist really needs to be fired. (UPDATE: He has been.)
Friday, I received a pitch that started:
Since 2000, roughly 98,000 people die annually from medication errors and are the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S. This is staggering when compared to some of the most widely reported causes of death: AIDS (13,712); car accidents (43,510); and Breast Cancer (41,555).
In addition to the poor English (people are the 3rd leading cause of death?), there’s a glaring mistake right in the first sentence, and at least one other mistake that might not be so obvious.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
No, 98,000 people do not die each year from medication errors in this country. That 98,000 figure is the high end of the estimate of annual deaths from adverse events in hospitals, as reported in the landmark 1999 Institute of Medicine report, “To Err Is Human: Building A Safer Health System.” The number of deaths attributed to medications was closer to 7,000.
By the way, the report was based on retrospective data, so claiming that these deaths started in 2000 is disingenuous.
As for the “3rd leading cause of death,” that also refers to inpatient hospital deaths attributed to all medical errors, not necessarily medication errors. That statistic comes from one of two places: A 2013 study in the Journal of Patient Safety or a BMJ study published just a few weeks ago. (We discuss those here.)
The 2013 report put the range of preventable deaths at 210,000-440,000, while the new study said there were at least 250,000 preventable hospital deaths per year. Extrapolating from the IOM statistics, you might be able to argue that 15,000-30,000 people die annually from medication errors, which is terrible, but still far less than 98,000.
Still, thanks to this misleading pitch, someone is going to report that the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists is trying to save nearly 100,000 lives a year. (UPDATE: The pitch was recalled after xMedCity News pointed out all the factual errors.)
The ASHP recently won a three-year contract from the Food and Drug Administration to implement a plan called Standardize 4 Safety. That program will develop standard concentrations for IV and oral liquid medications, in hopes of cutting medication errors.
Wonderful. This needs to happen. Just don’t tell me that this is going to prevent 98,000 deaths annually, and don’t let me read that number in other publications that don’t know the truth.
UPDATE: ASHP Communications Director Joseph Feese told MedCity News that the misleading “rogue” pitch came from a freelance publicist and had not been approved by the Bethesda, Maryland-based organization. Feese said that this publicist is no longer representing ASHP.
“We would never knowingly misrepresent facts for any purpose,” Feese said.
ASHP actually sent out a press release on May 10 about Standardize 4 Safety that made none of the outlandish claims we debunked. We had not seen it prior to June 1.
Photo: Bigstock
