Adverse drug events — reactions caused by drug interactions, allergy conflicts or inadvertent duplicate prescriptions — are among the most preventable causes of patient harm in outpatient care. Looms has integrated a comprehensive drug safety screening engine that runs automatically every time a prescription is prepared for issue.
Three layers of checking
The safety engine applies three distinct checks to every new prescription before it can be issued:
- Drug-drug interactions: cross-references the new drug against all medications currently active in the patient's Looms record, flagging known interactions by severity — contraindicated, major, moderate and minor
- Allergy conflicts: checks the drug and its class against known patient allergies, including cross-reactive allergy patterns
- Duplicate prescriptions: flags if a prescription for the same drug or therapeutic equivalent has been issued recently and may not yet be fully dispensed
How flagging works
Flags appear inline as the doctor prepares the prescription. Contraindicated interactions block the prescription from being issued without a clinical override and documented reason. Lower-severity flags are advisory — the prescriber sees the information and chooses whether to proceed.
All override decisions are logged in the patient's audit trail with the reason provided by the prescriber.
Limitation: external medications
The safety engine can only screen against medications recorded in the patient's Looms account. Medications prescribed by providers outside the Looms network will not appear unless the patient has added them manually. Patients are encouraged to keep their medication list current for this reason.