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MAY 10, 2022

At US Hospitals, a Drug Mix-Up Is Just a Few Keystrokes Away

This article was reprinted from Kaiser Health News (KHN). 

More than four years ago, Tennessee nurse RaDonda Vaught typed two letters into a hospital’s computerized medication cabinet, selected the wrong drug from the search results, and gave a patient a fatal dose.

Vaught was prosecuted this year in an extremely rare criminal trial for a medical mistake, but the drug mix-up at the center of her case is anything but rare. Computerized cabinets have become nearly ubiquitous in modern