Each year in the United States, the FDA receives more than 100,000 reports of suspected medication errors. Medication errors can occur when the drug is prescribed, when medication information is entered into a computer system, when the medication is being prepared, and when it’s given to a patient. Although often such errors lead to no serious harm, other errors can cause life threatening conditions and even death. This can be the case when a medication causes a patient’s blood to clot more quickly than it should, leading to the formation of a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) which can travel up to the lungs, block off blood flow (a pulmonary embolus), and cause death.
Many people in the United States have conditions which require their blood to be monitored to see how quickly or slowly it is clotting. This can include people who have just had particular surgeries, or people with cardiac conditions like a fib (atrial fibrillation), or who have a prosthetic heart valve.
For these patients, blood is tested regularly to check the INR level: how long it takes blood to form a clot. Healthy people have an INR level of 1.1 or below. For patients such as those described above, a target range may be 2.0 to 3.0, or 2.5 to 3.5. If the INR number gets too high, patients can have difficulty stopping bleeding. When it gets too low, dangerous clots can form.
Medication errors cause DVT in many different ways. For example, warfarin is a drug typically given to a patient to thin her blood if her INR is too low. Not giving the correct dose (too little or none at all), or not monitoring the patient’s INR level appropriately, can result in the patient developing a DVT and suffering harm or death as a result of it.
Medication errors involving how multiple drugs interact is another way in which a patient may develop a DVT and suffer harm. Some patients are taking many different drugs, and it is important for the provider to recognize the effects drugs can have on each other, and subsequently on the patient’s INR levels and risk of developing a DVT.
Fortunately, most physicians have available to them tools they can use to input medications and quickly understand whether a proposed new medication will have an unintended consequence if given with a patient’s current medication regimen. Here is an example of one anyone with internet access can use.
But if a doctor is careless and doesn’t check on the potential effects of drug interactions, and his patient dies due to a DVT caused by this carelessness, this can lead to a medical malpractice claim.
Medication errors cause DVT in many different ways, all of which are preventable.
