Clinical practice··2 min read
Memory is not a safety strategy
Doctors and pharmacists are asked to hold an impossible amount of medical knowledge in their heads. Safer care starts with systems that remember for them.
By The Terralis team
In brief
- 1Clinicians aren't short of knowledge. They're asked to recall too much of it, too fast.
- 2Patients increasingly arrive with several conditions and several medicines at once.
- 3The answer isn't a better memory. It's a system that holds the knowledge and shows what matters.
You spent years learning medicine. You know your work.
But let’s be honest: there are too many drugs.
Thousands of molecules. Thousands more brand names. Interactions, side effects, and doses that change with age, weight, pregnancy and kidney function. You know the medicines you handle every day inside out. Nobody knows everything about every one of them — and nobody should be expected to.
The patients are changing too
More and more, the person in front of you isn’t bringing one problem. They’re bringing a package: high blood pressure, diabetes, perhaps kidneys that aren’t what they used to be. Each condition comes with its own medicines, and each new medicine has to fit with everything already there.
In Ghana, as in much of the world, long-term conditions like these are rising — and they rarely arrive alone.
What we ask people to hold in their heads
For every patient, often in a few minutes:
- what they’re already taking
- what they’re allergic to
- which conditions change which doses
- which combinations are dangerous
- what the treatment guideline says
- what to tell them before they leave
Then the next patient walks in with a completely different story, and it all starts again.
This is recalled under pressure — often with a queue, often at the end of a long day. That isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a memory problem. And relying on memory alone, in that environment, is not a safety strategy.
Stop asking people to remember everything
Other high-stakes fields worked this out long ago. Pilots use checklists not because they can’t fly, but because the cost of missing one step is too high. The checklist doesn’t fly the plane. It makes sure nothing important is forgotten.
Medicine deserves the same idea, applied to knowledge.
The system holds the knowledge. The professional makes the decision.
A good system should know the drugs, the interactions, the dosing rules and the guidelines — and bring forward only what matters for this patient, at the moment of the decision. Not a wall of alerts. Not everything ever written about a drug. What matters, and where it came from.
It shouldn’t make the decision, and it shouldn’t diagnose. Judgement stays with the professional who can see the patient, hear them, and weigh what the data can’t.
What that gives back
When the system carries the remembering, you get your attention back: to listen, to ask the extra question, to explain the medicine properly, to notice what isn’t being said.
That’s what we’re building at Terralis. It’s early, and we’re building it with the doctors and pharmacists who will use it. If this sounds like your working day, we’d like to hear from you.
Written for healthcare professionals, for information. It is not a substitute for clinical judgement or official prescribing guidance.