A text mining analysis of medication quality related event reports from community pharmacies

Medication errors are estimated to cost $42 billion in annual global treatment costs. Pharmacy-based Patient Safety Organizations (PSO) are tasked with collecting and analyzing incidents, near misses, and unsafe condition reports as one way of engaging pharmacies in quality improvement efforts. Collectively, these reports are referred to as quality related events (QREs). Large-scale analysis of typed narratives from QRE reports across organizations has been a missing component of quality improvement programs.

To identify topics within the components of a proposed medication safety event framework contained in the free-text narrative of QRE reports.

A retrospective, observational analysis of data from a PSOs voluntary reporting system, from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2014. The dataset contained structured and unstructured data elements. A structural topic model extracted themes from the free-text narrative component of the report. These topics were assigned a human label and mapped onto constructs of the medication safety event framework.

A total of 531,555 QREs were analyzed from 1660 pharmacies. 90.6% were near miss and unsafe condition reports. There were 40 topics generated. There were 29 topics identified as QRE types, 3 were identified as contributing factors, and 5 were related to signals/alerts that an incident or near miss had occurred. One topic each was identified as a recovery step and a quality improvement strategy. One topic was not assigned a human label. Examples of topics labeled included incorrect tapering directions, needing to double-check work, and attention-related contributing factor.

The free-text narrative provided novel information compared to the structured fields of the reports. Topics were mapped onto a proposed medication safety event framework to advance knowledge of medication QREs and identify ways to improve medication safety in community pharmacy. Future work may focus on communicating these topics to the pharmacies to improve medication safety efforts.