High Rate of Errors in HIV Therapies

Segment Description: Daniel B. Chastain, PharmD, BCIDP, AAHIVP, clinical assistant professor at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy, discusses a retrospective study of errors occurring in the treatment of patients with HIV.

Interview Transcript (modified slightly for readability):

Contagion®: Could you summarize your findings?

Chastain: We conducted a multicenter retrospective study of 400 patients who were HIV infected who were admitted to the hospital, and ultimately found that there were 363 errors that occurred in 203 patients. So of those, about 100 had at least 2 errors. And so we looked for various different risk factors to make them more likely or less likely to have errors.

Contagion®: Did anything about the results surprise you?

Chastain: Two things did for the most part. One being, we've streamlined HIV therapy a little bit, but we're still seeing high rates of errors. In our study upwards of about 50% of patients experienced an error despite a large cohort of them having single drug therapy or single tablet regimens.

But the other thing that was kind of surprising, and certainly a limitation of the study is how few pharmacist interventions there were, there are only about 25 pharmacist interventions total.

Now, of course, that plays with documentation. But certainly something to consider going forward in terms of getting pharmacist faces and names out there a little bit more for being able to reconcile those errors a little bit better.