According There are 1.5 million medication errors in the USA every year. These are  all serious enough to cause injury, according to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. This organization recommends that health-care providers use electronic systems to prescribe drugs.

Comment
Generally speaking, Canadian stats run at 10% of the USA. This implies 150,000 serious medication errors every year. That's a lot of people hurt by medicine.
But are electronic systems the complete answer?

If you visit hospitals on a regular basis, ie: have kids or grandparents, then you will see how the patient moves around the health "assembly line". Our medical professions have become assembly line workers. Each doing their particular role very well. But with the assumption that complete information has been passed along to them. Mahir Arar is a case of incomplete information. But not alone. The FBI found 12,000 invalid arrest warrants being issued in the US, every day!

Processes Validate

Without good processes to capture, validate and pass information, technology will just become an added cost, creating even more errors. And this applies equally to the processes used in the creation of those technologies.

Think about that at your next interaction with the health assembly line.

Source: ' ProForma: stats and stories to watch', Baseline Magazine, September 2006