Ebtesam Savari; Sima Ajami
Volume 12, Issue 2 , April 2015, , Pages 263-272
Abstract
On one hand, drug therapy is one of the most powerful tools for the treatment of diseases, and on the other hand, one of the most common medical errors is related to hand written prescription. Patient safety is endangered due to illegible of hand written prescription by physicians and thereby the potential ...
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On one hand, drug therapy is one of the most powerful tools for the treatment of diseases, and on the other hand, one of the most common medical errors is related to hand written prescription. Patient safety is endangered due to illegible of hand written prescription by physicians and thereby the potential of medical errors would increase. Implementation of electronic prescribing and electronic health records can solve multiple problems of hand written prescription and decrease expenses of medical errors. The aim of this study was to introduce electronic prescription and its impact on medical errors. The study was a narrative review, which was performed by searching in Google search engine, PubMed, ISI web of science, Scoupus, and Embas, with keywords such as Electronic Prescription، E-prescription، Medication Errors، Patient safety’, in journals (text and abstracts), books, proceeding of conference articles, and scientific documents from 2000 to 2014. This study was done in 2014. About 58 articles, books, theses, and proceedings were obtained of which 35 cases were selected based on their relation to this issue. E-prescribing technology is a powerful tool to manage patients' medication that can lead to improve the quality of drug treatment. This technology associated with Electronic Health Records and using the support of decision support systems (DSS) can reduce the medication errors and increase patient safety is medication.
