IT Glitch Caused 400 Patients To Receive Mislabelled Medicine
400 patients who popped by one of the 83 general practice (GP) clinics on Saturday (1 Sep) would probably have received mislabelled drugs.
Instead of 10ml, a patient was instructed to take 10 bottles of cough mixture.
Another patient was told to take two strips instead of two tablets.
All this happened because of an IT glitch that hit GP Connect, the computer system they were using.
Admin & clinical system glitch
Run by Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), GP Connect aims to support better clinical care.
Currently, 150 clinics are part of the system which lets GPs submit patient data to the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR).
The system glitch happened during a planned system update — but despite incorrectly labelled medicines, quantities were still distributed correctly.
Clinics’ swift response saved the day
Upon realising the mistake, the clinics immediately rang up the affected patients to notify them of the error.
The patients were told to ignore the instructions labelled on the prescribed drugs.
As for the IT glitch, it has already been rectified last Sunday (2 Sep).
An IHiS spokesman told The Straits Times
Patient safety is our priority. We take this incident very seriously and deeply apologise for the error.
IHiS is also running a thorough review of the system to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.
A close call
Thankfully, no patients have overdosed on drugs due to the mislabelling.
The quick reaction by the GPs and IHiS has successfully ameliorated the problem before it got out of hand.
At the end of the day, no matter how robust the system may be, manual checks should still be carried out to detect errors.
Let’s hope that this is a one-off incident and that it does not happen again.
Featured image from TJiaLuSingapore.
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