Electronic Prescribing In The Ambulator Care Setting

摘要

In the ambulatory care setting, studies indicate that between 1.5% and 4.0% of prescriptions are in error with potentially serious patient risk.1"3 Adverse drug events (ADEs) occur in 5-18% of ambulatory patients and at a rate of 50.1 per 1000 patient years in older persons.4'5 In the United States, more than 8.8 million ADEs occur each year in ambulatory care; 3 million of those are preventable.6 Many errors result from miscommunica-tion caused by poor penmanship and illegible handwriting, as well as unclear or ambiguous abbreviations and dose designations on paper prescriptions. Just as troubling, the current paper-based system leads to major system inefficiencies. Widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) that feature electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) capabilities can eliminate these medication errors and inefficiencies. EHR systems in the marketplace today are far more advanced than those available five years ago. Driven by the federal government under the leadership of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, national standards for EHRs and e-prescribing have now been developed and widely adopted by leading industry vendors.