E-Prescribing Doesn’t Slash Errors, Study Finds

U.S News & World Report
June 30, 2011

Outpatient electronic prescribing systems make the same common mistakes that occur in manual systems, a new study finds.

Researchers examined 3,850 computer-generated prescriptions received by a commercial pharmacy chain in three different U.S. states over a four-week period in 2008. Of those prescriptions, 452 (nearly 12 percent) contained a total of 466 errors, of which about one-third were deemed to be potentially harmful...