Monday, April 26, 2010

CPOE and patient safety

From a study published in Health Affairs:

A national sample of sixty-two hospitals voluntarily used a simulation tool designed to assess how well safety decision support worked when applied to medication orders in computerized order entry. The simulation detected only 53 percent of the medication orders that would have resulted in fatalities and 10–82 percent of the test orders that would have caused serious adverse drug events. It is important to ascertain whether actual implementations of computerized physician order entry are achieving goals such as improved patient safety.


I don't have access to the full text of this article. I wonder how the investigators could tell which orders would have resulted in fatalities and how they defined serious adverse drug events. More importantly, how many hazzards were created by CPOE?

Via Today's Hospitalist.

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