Computerized physician order entry and medication errors in a pediatric critical care unit

• HIT Description: computerized provider order entry (CPOE) system More info...
  
• Purpose of Study: evaluate the impact of computerized provider order entry (CPOE) on the frequency of errors in the medication ordering process in a pediatric critical care unit
  
• Years of study: 2001-2002
  
• Study Design: pre-post
  
• Outcomes: impact on patient safety
  

• Settings: all patients admitted to a 20-bed multidisciplinary pediatric ICU at an academic institution in a large city
• Intervention: compare occurrences of errors in the medication ordering process before and after implementation of the CPOE system
• Evaluation Method: pharmacist review for errors of all eligible orders and entry into a database
• Description: WizOrder, aCPOE system developed at Vanderbilt that provides clinicians with several types of decision support including drug allergy alerts, dose checking, drug interaction alerts and US FDA alerts. Also includes clinical pathways and makes recommendations for dose adjustments
• Interoperability: interfaces with Pyxis Medstation 2000 system and the pharmacy computer system. Also interfaces with Vanderbilt's computerized archive of medical records
• Quality of Care and Patient Safety Outcome: Rates of potential adverse drug events (ADEs), medication prescribing errors (MPs) and rule violations (RVs) all decreased significantly after implementation of the CPOE system (40.9% reduction in potential ADEs, 99.4% reduction in MPEs and 97.9% reduction in RVs, p , 0.001 for all comparisons)