Medical errors are still harming patients. AI could help change that.

Medical mistakes affect at least 1 in 20 patients. Researchers at UW Medicine in Seattle designed an AI device that can prevent doctors from injecting the wrong drug.

John Wiederspan is well aware of how things can go wrong in the high-pressure, high-stakes environment of an operating room.

“During situations such as trauma or a patient doing poorly, there’s a real rush to try and get emergency drugs into the patient as fast as possible,” said Wiederspan, a nurse anesthetist at UW Medicine in Seattle. “And that’s when mistakes can occur, when you’re flustered, your adrenaline’s rushing, you’re drawing up drugs and you’re trying to push them.”

Despite ongoing efforts to improve patient safety, it’s estimated that at least 1 in 20 patients still experience medical mistakes in the health care system. One of the most common categories of mistakes is medication errors, where for one reason or another, a patient is given either the wrong dose of a drug or the wrong drug altogether. In the U.S., these errors injure approximately 1.3 million people a year and result in one death each day, according to the World Health Organization.

In response, many hospitals have introduced guardrails, ranging from color coding schemes that make it easier to differentiate between similarly named drugs, to barcode scanners that verify that the correct medicine has been given to the correct patient.