Reducing Risk: How Cross-Checking Prevents Paramedic Medication Errors
Reducing Risk: How Cross-Checking Prevents Paramedic Medication Errors
Medication errors in emergency medical services (EMS) can happen in high-stress, high-stakes situations—and even experienced paramedics are not immune. Simple yet effective verification processes during patient reporting can make a life-saving difference, yet studies on self-reported incidents highlight the need for better safeguards (Vilke 2007). One of the most effective yet underutilized tools is cross-checking: a brief but critical pause to verify medications, dosages, and documentation. Sansio explores how a culture of double-checking can dramatically reduce errors and improve patient outcomes.
Think Twice, Save a Life
Paramedics responding to an anonymous survey reported to have encountered medication errors from protocol errors to wrong medication errors. However, a whopping 63% were dose-related errors. Dosing is a crucial step in providing patient care and can make all the difference in a case, down to the microgram.
The top contributing factor to those dose-related errors?
“Failure to triple check,” (Vilke 2007).
Who is Affected by Medication Errors?
Who is affected by medication errors? Most importantly, the patient – it is our job to make sure that emergency responders have the tools to always put the patient first, and that includes checking all work.
“I have been involved from the administrative side of a wrong medication delivery, and it was not a good situation on many levels,” shared Director of Sales and Marketing and Retired Fire Lieutenant and Paramedic, Don Bertucci.
“Your first concern, of course, is about the patient and any adverse effects that the medication could have on that person. Once you get past that, you must deal with the how's and the why's, followed by disciplinary action, re-training, and various other tasks that need to be completed to ensure that it doesn't happen again.”
All the patient risk and additional time needed to correct such a serious issue could be avoided with a more simple, hard-to-miss cross-checking strategy.
So, we created one.
Cross Checking Made Easy
“When our customer asked for the electronic collection of data for the Medication Administration Cross Check, I was all for it and brought it to our team for quick development,” continued Bertucci. “It has been a great resource to not only drive EMS personnel behavior, but also to document that it was done. Both are essential to providing high quality patient care.”
By adding a Medication Administration Cross Check (MACC) option in our ePCR software, HealthEMS and MobileTouch, users can be required to fill out a section within the patient report that confirms medication cross checking has been completed. Teams can also use the section of the report for quality improvement by including details about the near miss or potential error. The MACC requirement can be added to any medication and is set up by the agency based on their needs.
MACC in Action
When administering a narcotic like Fentanyl, dosage, unit and route are imperative pieces of information to get correct the first time around. Once the medication is chosen in the report, a MACC table will materialize and show required steps to complete before finishing that patient report. The table will ask:
✅ “Was MACC Completed?”
✅ “Did the MACC catch a potential error?”
✅ “Describe the near miss”
Serving Those Who Serve Others
The Sansio team is eager to continue developing innovative features for our ePCR software every day. By identifying the bigger issues faced by emergency response teams, we can help build better solutions to ensure better patient care and easier documentation.
Interested in learning more about Sansio and other HealthEMS features? Connect with Sansio at www.sansio.com/contact-us.
About Sansio, Inc. – HealthEMS and MobileTouch
Sansio is a recognized leader in healthcare software solutions, providing intuitive and reliable platforms such as HealthEMS to streamline healthcare operations. Sansio is dedicated to enhancing the efficiency and quality of healthcare services through cutting-edge technology and comprehensive support.
For more information visit www.sansio.com.
For media inquiries, please contact:
Lindsay Miller, Marketing Specialist
Sansio, Inc.
lindsay.miller@sansio.com
