Orchestral launches medication safety tool in New Zealand

Orchestral has launched Orchestral for Medication Safety in New Zealand, a tool designed to help clinicians check prescriptions in real time within pharmacy dispensing workflows.

The launch comes amid concern over prescribing errors in New Zealand. Data cited by Orchestral suggests there could be about one million problem scripts a year.

The product is designed to sit within existing pharmacy dispensing systems, checking prescriptions against dispensing guidelines to confirm dose safety and identify possible interactions with other medicines a patient is taking. Alerts appear directly in the pharmacist's workflow.

Medication safety is the first in a broader set of clinical safety workflows Orchestral is developing for pharmacy and primary care. The company says the product was developed in response to the level of prescription error risk in New Zealand.

Estimates of harm linked to prescription errors vary. Figures cited by Orchestral put the annual number of deaths in New Zealand resulting from prescription errors at around 200, while a volunteer audit at 68 pharmacies in Midland New Zealand found 1,257 prescription problems over one week.

The same audit found that 26% of those errors carried a high risk of patient harm. Extrapolated nationally, Orchestral says, the findings would point to one million problem prescriptions a year and 250,000 with a high risk of patient harm.

Those figures highlight the pressure on pharmacists, who remain responsible for checking prescriptions under time constraints while also monitoring doses, interactions and other clinical factors.

Orchestral chief executive Lucy Porter said pharmacists are being asked to shoulder too much risk without enough system support.

"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 carrying 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."

How it works

Orchestral is positioning the product as a layer within established clinical systems rather than a separate process.

The company describes its wider platform as a health AI orchestrator that links data sources, AI agents, workflows and algorithms across healthcare settings. In practice, Orchestral for Medication Safety focuses on one specific task: reviewing prescriptions for dose and interaction risks as they are dispensed.

That narrower use case may make adoption easier to assess, particularly in pharmacy settings where medication checking is already a defined and regulated part of the workflow. It also places the product in an area where patient safety concerns are well understood by both clinicians and health administrators.

Wider aim

Porter said the company sees medication safety as part of a broader problem involving fragmented health data and the limits of the tools currently available to clinicians.

"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 tools they have today.

"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, such as medication safety, to make the whole system intelligent. That's the category we've created."

Orchestral says it is already in discussions in New Zealand about pilot projects for the medication safety product. Internationally, it sees the same model being used for other clinical workflows where clinicians must make decisions quickly using multiple sources of patient information.

For now, the immediate focus is on prescribing risk in pharmacies, where a missed dose issue or contraindication can have direct consequences for patient safety.