Polyglot Systems, Inc. recently partnered with Community Care of North Carolina (CCNC), a Raleigh based health network operated by physicians, hospitals, health departments, and departments of social services, to offer Meducation® technology to support North Carolina residents who are considered low-health literate.
“Medication dosing errors are critical to patient safety and health outcomes”
Incorporated into North Carolina's suite of software utilized by 900 of the state's primary care physicians, Meducation is the first product of its kind to address language barriers, low-health literacy and age-related issues to reduce medication adherence errors, thus improving understanding of prescription medication instructions.
"Medication dosing errors are critical to patient safety and health outcomes," said Troy Trygstad, CCNC Pharmacy Programs director. "Ensuring that adequate steps are taken to help our patients understand their medication is an important initiative to CCNC."
Developed in part by funding and support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Meducation currently supports 11 languages using expert human translations, simplifies instructions to a fifth to sixth grade reading level, provides pictograms of instructions, and offers printing in 3 large fonts while also providing videos of commonly misused medications such as inhalers and eye drops.
According to the Institute of Medicine, nearly 4-billion prescriptions are filled annually in the United States alone, making sure patients take those medications by understanding and following directions appropriately is a critical component for patient care.
"Medication mistakes are the most common form of medical errors in this country and result in more than 700,000 emergency room visits, and nearly 120,000 hospitalizations," said Dr. Charles Lee, president and founder of Polyglot Systems. "We are excited to partner with CCNC to expand our mission to decrease medication errors in the low-health literate population, as well as in all healthcare venues including hospitals, health care facilities and pharmacies."
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