E-prescribing Reduces Medication Errors

Journal of General Internal Medicine

E-prescribing can reduce errors in community-based practices, according to a study published in the .

When e-prescribing was used instead of traditional prescribing in community-based practices, errors were significantly reduced according to results of the study.

Researchers at Weill Medical College of Cornell University sought to investigate the effectiveness of e-prescribing by analyzing the number and severity of prescribing errors in 12 community-based medical practices in the Hudson Valley region of New York.

A comparison was made between a group of 15 doctors who utilized e-prescribing and 15 who continued to use the old method between September 2005 and June 2007. The e-prescribers used a commercial, stand-alone system with clinical decision support including dose recommendations and checks for drug-allergy interactions, drug-to-drug interactions and duplicate therapies.

The results indicated that the error rates for e-prescribing adopters decreased “nearly sevenfold one year after adoption,” while the non-adopters’ error rates remained high.

Additionally, illegibility errors were very high at baseline and were completely eliminated by e-prescribing.