New AI-powered tool aims to reduce NZ’s highrate of prescribing errors

Data suggests a million script errors annually in New Zealand 

The world’s first health AI orchestrator, Orchestral, has launched Orchestral for Medication Safety, a product that supports clinicians to check prescriptions in real time inside pharmacy dispensing workflows to flag dose and interaction risks. 

The product was developed in direct response to New Zealand’s rates of prescription errors. Estimates for how many people die in New Zealand as a result of prescription errors range hugely from around 2001. 

But from Orchestral’s point of view one person is too many whether that’s due to dosing errors or due to contraindications with other medications they are taking. 

Lucy Porter, Chief Executive of Orchestral, said pharmacists are being asked to carry an unsustainable level of clinical risk and technology can solve this. 

“Last year a week-long volunteer audit at 68 pharmacies in Midland New Zealand found 1,257 problems in prescriptions sent by GPs, specialists, midwives, dentists and other prescribers with 26% of these mistakes having a high risk of patient harm. 

“If you extrapolate that data across the whole country there are one million problem scripts per year and 250,000 have a high risk of patient harm – we have to change this. 

“Pharmacists are expected to check every prescription under time pressure while holding thousands of drug interactions and clinical considerations in mind. That is not a people problem, it is a systems problem. Orchestral for Medication Safety is designed to provide a safety net by checking every prescription, every interaction and every risk, inside the existing prescribing and dispensing workflow. This supports pharmacists’ clinical judgement in real time,” says Porter. 

Orchestral for Medication Safety is delivered through the Orchestral platform, the world’s first health AI orchestrator, that empowers healthcare providers to harness the full potential of their data. 

The team are already having positive discussions in New Zealand about piloting this technology, and globally this is just one of the use cases for Orchestral that health systems are focused on. 

Orchestral for Medication Safety sits within existing pharmacy dispensing systems. Prescriptions are checked automatically against dispensing guidelines to confirm dose safety and identify potential interactions with other medicines a patient is taking, with relevant alerts surfaced directly into the pharmacist’s workflow. 

Medication safety is the first of a set of clinical safety workflows Orchestral is building for pharmacy and primary care. 

“No patient should be left behind because of missed data. Yet no clinician can quickly connect all the available health information about a patient and relevant medical research with the current tools they have. 

“More data is not the answer, better insight is. We’re here to turn the world’s scattered health data into life-saving insight that’s trusted, explainable, and ready for clinicians and patients when it matters most. 

“The future of healthcare AI isn’t about more models or bigger clouds. It’s about orchestration like medication safety to make the whole system intelligent. That’s the category we’ve created,” says Porter.