Do Electronic Pharmacy Prescriptions Reduce Medication Errors

I have written many posts on the topic of electronic prescriptions. Up until now, my review of the literature has suggested that it reduces the number of medication errors whether the result of a pharmacy, hospital, doctor, or nurse. However, at least some researchers are now concluding that the practice of using computer software to enter the prescription, order the prescription, and fill the prescription with the proper medicine at the proper dose and frequency can create errors unique to the electronic format.

Lynn Peoples recently wrote on the subject for Anesthesiology News. Her article quotes statistics provided by anesthesia resident and researcher Karen Caputo Nanji M.D. Apparently Dr. Nanji and her colleagues studied pharmacy chains in Florida and other states. Their findings included the fact that 11.6% of the electronic prescriptions had errors. Of those errors 60% were missing information, 15.9% lacked clarity, 15.7% had conflicting information, and 7.6% involved the wrong prescription.

Of course these results are from only one study. However, the researchers did review 3898 electronic prescriptions. The sample size seems large enough to be statistically relevant. If so, it maybe that electronic prescribing does little in the long run to reduce prescription pharmacy errors.