Your doc's illegible scrawl is deadly, but only 50% of hospitals use IT to solve the problem
- IT TOPICS:Emerging Technology
If there were any doubt about the value of computerized physician order entry (CPOE) systems in hospitals, new research should put that doubt to rest. University of Minnesota researchers reviewed 12 other studies that compared the number of handwritten and computerized medication errors made by hospital physicians. (Illegible handwriting and transcription errors account for more than 60% of medication errors.) The results of the review?
Medication errors, which include prescribing the wrong drug, ordering an inaccurate dosage, or administering a drug at the wrong time, dropped by as much as 66% in U.S. hospitals that switched to a CPOE system.
“Evidence from these studies show that computerized systems can reduce mistakes, but unfortunately less than 50% of hospitals have implemented these systems. There is a lot of work to be done in the future,” says Tatyana Shamliyan, lead review author and a research associate at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
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