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Posts Tagged ‘E-prescribing’

According to Rainu Kaushal and colleagues from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, electronic prescriptions can reduce prescribing errors up to seven-fold. The study, about the benefits of e-prescribing in primary healthcare setting, is published online in the Journal Of General Internal Medicine.

The authors also found that prescribing errors may occur much more frequently in community-based healthcare practices than previously thought.

“At a time when the federal government and many state governments, led by New York state, are pushing for increased use of information technology to improve the delivery of health care, it is important that physicians are aware of how technology like electronic prescribing systems can improve the safety and value of care they give patients,” Rainu Kaushal said.

The authors compared the medication prescribing errors between 15 physicians who adopted e-prescribing and 15 who sticked to the traditional paper-based prescribing, in ambulatory community based practices in the Hudson Valley region of New York, from September 2005 and June 2007.

E-prescribing was done using a commercial, stamd-alone system with clinical decision support system such as dosing recommendations and checks for drug allergies, drug interactions and duplicate treatment therapies.

The primary outcome of the study was prescribing errors. The authors found that there is a seven fold decrease in errors (from 42.5 percent to 6.6 percent during a year) with use of e-prescribing while the error percentage remained high with paper prescriptions (37.3 percent to 38.4 percent at one year).

“Ambulatory prescribing errors rates might be much higher than previously reported,” the study authors conclude. “This is one of the first studies to show that a commercially available, stand-alone eprescribing system is effective in primary care practices, demonstrating a nearly seven-fold decrease in errors.”