Unsupported Health Information Technology Can Lead to Patient Harm

As alluded to in a previous posting by Chris Madjerich, the Leapfrog Group for Patient Safety has released a report on the safety of electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) systems in hospitals. In a study of 214 hospitals testing efficacy of their clinical decision support systems using the Leapfrog CPOE Evaluation Tool, the systems, on average, missed half of the routine medication orders and a third of potentially fatal disorders. From the executive summary:

"For the sake of safe patient care, hospitals must test and monitor their CPOE systems on an ongoing basis to achieve true meaningful use. In addition, vendors and hospitals must collaborate more closely during the pre-implementation and implementation phases to ensure that best practices are shared and followed.

The Leapfrog Group is calling on the federal government to ensure that any definition of meaningful use employed as a requirement for federal financial assistance to hospitals to adopt CPOE and other health care IT systems require monitoring and improvement at implementation and on a long-term basis."

It is not only critical to focus not only on implementation and selection of a good drug product information partner to support the system, but to encourage continued development and dissemination of best-practice information from users and administrators.