Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death. One in four patients are harmed while receiving healthcare. Medication errors cost a lot and kill a lot. They are a costly but preventable problem. MedGuard, a system developed using 1.3 billion medical big data and artificial intelligence, helps to prevent medication errors. MedGuard delivers proactive protection and recommendations and has been tested in a live clinical trial at three teaching hospitals.

Medical errors were the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer in 2013, and the eighth leading cause of death in 1999. Unsafe medication practices and medication errors are leading causes of injury and avoidable harm in health care systems around the world. According to a WHO report, the estimated annual cost associated with medication errors is US$42 billion. One in four patients are harmed while receiving healthcare. Prescription errors happen every two seconds. The World Health Organization launched a global effort to halve medication-related errors in 5 years, 51% of which are generated by prescription. Computerized physician order entry systems (CPOE) have been widely implemented in Taiwan and in most developed countries. A CPOE is the most critical and useful point to prevent medication errors. For example, diabetic patients should be prescribed Euglucon (to lower blood sugar) but Euclidan (to dilate blood vessels) was mistakenly prescribed more than 1,000 times in one hospital within one month; this error has potentially happened in other hospitals. In order to decrease medication errors or near misses, numerous hospitals have developed a rule-based function on CPOE to clinically support physicians when they submit prescriptions. However, there are limitations to its use. For example, there is a 50-90% override rate for alerts, and it is not cost-effective; in other words, it is entirely useless to physicians.