E-prescribing urged as one strategy to prevent medication errors

A panel's report calls on all physicians to prescribe electronically by 2010, but experts say that's a reach.

By Kevin B. O'Reilly, AMNews staff. Aug. 21, 2006.

At least 1.5 million people are injured annually by preventable medication errors that occur at every stage of the process, from prescribing to dispensing to patient administration, according to a July Institute of Medicine report.

The new report says physicians, nurses, pharmacists, patients and drugmakers must work together to combat the many factors that contribute to the persistence of these errors, which the IOM earlier reported kill an estimated 7,000 people a year.

"The 1999 report ["To Err is Human"] raised awareness about errors in general," said J. Lyle Bootman, PhD, ScD, co-chair of the IOM Committee on Identifying and Preventing Medication Errors and dean of the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy. "The current report makes clear that we still have a long way to go."

Albert W. Wu, MD, MPH, a panel member and professor of health policy and management and internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said the report's findings make clear that medication errors are the most far-reaching of medical errors.

"I'm a patient-safety researcher, and even as we went through the process I was surprised by just how common and how serious a problem this is," Dr. Wu said. "We all need to wake up and take a part in fixing it."

Most important for physicians, the panel called on all prescribers to have a plan to implement an electronic prescribing system by 2008 and to have such systems in place by 2010.

Wilson D. Pace, MD, a panel member and Green-Edelman Chair for Practice-based Research at the University of Colorado, said even the most talented physicians need electronic systems to help them prescribe safely.