Original articleElectronic Prescribing Reduced Prescribing Errors in a Pediatric Renal Outpatient Clinic
Section snippets
Study Site
This study was conducted at an acute tertiary care pediatric hospital during implementation of a commercially available EP system (JAC Computer Services Ltd), which was introduced in the pediatric nephrology outpatient clinic on March 16, 2006, starting with 1 nephrology consultant and gradually rolling out to include all nephrology teams. We prospectively collected pediatric nephrology outpatient clinic prescriptions, which were evaluated at a later date for errors. All patients attending the
Results
A total of 520 patients had 2242 items prescribed on 1141 prescriptions during the study period. Of these, 8 prescriptions, involving 20 prescribed items, were excluded from analysis due to incomplete information. Patient demographic data are given in Table I.
There was good agreement between the 2 researchers for error identification (κ = 0.65; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.46 to 0.85). The overall prescribing error rate was 77.4% (95% CI = 75.3% to 79.4%) for handwritten items and 4.8% (95%
Discussion
EP significantly reduced overall prescribing error rates and resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of patient visits that were error-free. Dosing errors are typically considered the most common type of errors in pediatrics.17 In our study, however, omission errors (particularly those involving route of administration) were more frequent. This may be attributed to the design of the original prescription form. There was a combined prompt for the dose and route (ie, “dose/route”);
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Cited by (0)
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Y.J. receives funding for a PhD studentship from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, First Databank Europe Ltd, and JAC Computer Systems Ltd. These companies did not contribute to study design; the collection, analysis or interpretation of the data; or writing the manuscript or the decision to submit it for publication.
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I.W. has received funding from the UK Medical Research Council and UK Department of Health in the research of medication errors and the use of technology in their reduction.