IT-Related Medication Incidents

About one in six medication incidents reported to the Dutch central medication incidents registration (CMR) by community pharmacies and hospitals were related to IT, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Most of the incidents in community pharmacies were attributable to human factors issues (e.g., poor screen design), while most of the incidents in hospitals occurred during input to computerized provider order-entry (CPOE) systems.

Using a set of search terms they developed, along with a classification developed by Magrabi et al., the authors analyzed and classified 4,161 medication incidents reported to the Dutch CMR between March 2010 and February 2011; they found that 668 (16.1%) of these incidents were IT related. A greater percentage of IT-related incidents occurred in community pharmacies (21.5%, or 351 out of 1,636 incidents) than in hospitals (12.6%, or 317 out of 2,517 incidents). In both settings, the majority of IT-related incidents (79.7% of the incidents in community pharmacies and...