Are Adverse Drug Events a Big Problem?
There are many ways to measure the size of the problem of medication safety. Recent work at CDC has focused on the short-term, severe problems of medicines taken by people outside of hospital settings. It is estimated that there are more than 700,000 visits to emergency departments for adverse drug events each year in the United States. Nearly 120,000 of these patients need to be hospitalized for further treatment. This is an important patient safety problem, but many of these adverse drug events are preventable.
