Outpatient prescribing errors and the impact of computerized prescribing

• HIT Description: Electronic prescribing More info...
  
• Purpose of Study: Assess simple electronic prescribing systems for safety
  
• Years of study: 1999-2000
  
• Study Design: Cohort study
  
• Outcomes: patient safety
  

• Settings: 4 Boston adult primary care practices affiliated with a single academic medical center. 2 practices were hospital-based, and 2 were community-based.
• Intervention: basic electronic prescribing support
• Evaluation Method: assessment for potential adverse drug events (ADE)
• Description: Basic computerized prescribing (one commercial system, one home-grown) that provided printed prescriptions and had required fields and offered nonmandatory default doses, but did not have automatic checks for doses, frequencies, allergies, or drug interactions.
• Quality of Care and Patient Safety Outcome: 7.6% of 1879 prescriptions contained a prescribing error, 3 of which led to preventable ADEs. Basic computerized electronic prescribing sites had fewer, but not statistically different frequencies of error (4.3% v 11.0%, p=0.31). Physician reviewers judged that more advanced prescribing support systems with mandatory default dose and frequency lists could have prevented 95% of the ADEs