NPR Online (01/31/12) Burnham, Ted
As many as one in seven hospitalized patients experience some form of error in care, and about one-third of these mistakes are related to drugs. When doctors enter prescriptions on a computer instead of with pen and paper, hospitals can see error rates fall by up to 60 percent. A team of researchers, reporting their findings in PLoS Medicine, tracked medication errors in two Australian hospitals before and after the installation of electronic prescription systems. Incomplete or unclear prescriptions had numbered in the hundreds before the systems were installed, but fell to single digits at both hospitals after the electronic prescription systems. The new system not only removed the problem of illegible prescription writing, but limited other miscalculations and oversights by including data about each patient and rules for proper dosing, allergies, and drug interactions. The software provided hints and warnings that helped guide doctors' decisions. Although software design accounted for 35 percent of the remaining errors, most mistakes were minor, and could be prevented once the program was updated and improved.

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