Prevention of pediatric medication errors by hospital pharmacists and the potential benefit of computerized physician order entry.
Prior research documents the effectiveness of pharmacists at preventing medication errors. This study was conducted at an academic pediatric hospital with pharmacists who reviewed all medication orders. Researchers analyzed the frequency of medication errors, the types of errors, and whether the error was intercepted by a pharmacist. Although the overall error rate was similar to a previous study, half of the potentially harmful errors occurred at the time of drug administration and thus could not have been intercepted by the pharmacist. The authors note that such administration errors are also unlikely to be prevented by computerized provider order entry.