Improving the safety of heparin therapy.

Improving patient safety and reducing medication errors can be a daunting prospect. One way of concentrating the efforts of a health-care organization is to concentrate first on medications that are “highrisk.” These medications are complex to use, have a great potential for error at multiple steps and also have a great potential for patient harm from the medication. Heparin is certainly a “high-risk” medication. My hospital belongs to a collaboration of health-care organizations in our metro area that are working together to improve patient safety. One of the first projects was to formulate recommendations to improve the safety of heparin therapy that could be used in our collaboration’s hospitals.