Kaiser Scrambles to Correct Prescription Mix-Up

A computer glitch last week caused Kaiser Permanente in Northern California to issue thousands of prescriptions that were potentially erroneous to patients throughout the region.

So far, Kaiser officials say no patients have reported adverse reactions to a prescription because of the mix-up, which affected refills issued Thursday morning in the health-care giant’s pharmacy system only in Northern California. A power outage reportedly triggered the computer trouble.

The problem may have involved as many as 13,700 prescriptions being prepared Thursday morning, according to state officials who said they are looking into the matter. About 9,000 of those had not yet been dispensed and were then reviewed and corrected if necessary.

Of the remaining 4,700 patients who received prescriptions, Kaiser officials said, all but about 140 had been contacted by Monday. Couriers notified the chronically ill.

Kaiser officials said Monday that they did not know exactly how many errors were made, but state officials said three possible types of mistakes had been discovered: a patient either received the wrong medication, the wrong dosage, or the right medicine with the wrong instructions.

“This is an extremely rare technical problem, but if anyone who picked up a prescription Thursday afternoon has not been contacted by us, they should immediately call their pharmacy,” said Kaiser spokesman Jim Anderson

State officials praised the hospital giant’s quick response, but said that the sheer scope of the mix-up could have been serious and that the glitch merits a thorough investigation.

The state Board of Pharmacy said that it has received no consumer complaints about the prescriptions, but that it, with the state Department of Managed Health Care, would closely monitor Kaiser’s efforts to determine how the mistake happened.

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” said managed health care spokesman Steven Fisher. “We’re looking into what happened and why it happened.”

Daniel Zingale, the state’s former HMO czar who is now secretary of the governor’s Cabinet, said Monday: “No one wants to play lotto with prescription drugs, so we’re taking a hard look at the timeliness of their response down to the last pill. We want to be sure there’s a system for identifying this type of problem when it arises quickly.”