Pharmacy Manager Strategies for Reducing Financial Losses From Adverse Drug Events by Polypharmacy Patients

Every year over 100,000 deaths occur in the U.S. from adverse drug events derived from medication errors. Medication errors account for an annual cost of $100 to $200 billion. Healthcare pharmacists lack strategies to reduce adverse drug events and medication errors from taking place. Grounded in complex adaptive system theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies to reduce advere drug events and medication errors. The participants were 5 pharmacist managers in a county in central Florida. These pharmacists were from different community pharmacies, and each had a minimum of 5 years’ experience in the field. The participants all responded to the same set of open-ended questions during semistructured interviews. Additional data sources for this study were field notes, business prescription literature, and analyzing observations of the participants. Data were analyzed using Yin’s 5 analytic techniques. Themes identified included: polypharmacy and the unknown, HIPAA and legal constraints, and CAS, the edge of chaos and clarity. The findings from this study may enable pharmacy managers to increase patient counseling time, encourage patient medication adherence; thereby, decreasing liability costs and additional medical expenses for polypharmacy patients. Social changes that may occur as a result of this study include a decrease in adverse events for polypharmacy patients and an increase in the quality of life for these patients