Computers triumph over infamous doctors' handwriting
Wednesday, 27 Jun 2007 10:58
Prescriptions can be written with unclear handwriting, study claims
Doctors' handwriting is infamously bad, with illegible scrawls often written down on prescriptions.
This leads to thousands of medication errors each year, but a new computerised system could help to reduce this by two-thirds, a new study has found.
Problems with handwriting that is difficult to read include uncertainty over the prescribed drug's name, for example carelessly written prescriptions could easily mix up the tranquilizer Zyprexa and the antihistamine Zyrtec.
"These medication errors are very painful for doctors, as well as the patients. Nobody wants to make a mistake," said the study's lead author Tatyana Shamliyan, a research associate at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.
The researchers studied 12 reports that compared medication errors with handwritten and computerised prescriptions from in-house doctors.
They found that US hospitals which had switched to a computerised physician order entry systems saw a 66 per cent fall in prescription errors.
The biggest improvement was seen in hospitals with a higher number of medication errors. Computerised systems also make life easier for physicians, the study found.
The research is published in the journal Health Services Research.