The computer systems that healthcare professionals use when exchanging information about a patient do not always appear to be user-friendly. Warnings about interactions with other medications or incorrectly chosen dosages are not always easy to read on the screen. In addition, selecting the right drug from the list of drug names sometimes proves difficult. This increases the chance of making so-called medication errors.
Influence of the computer on medication errors
From the exploratory research it has not yet become clear how often user-unfriendly computer systems lead to medication errors. Although doctors and pharmacists must record and describe a mistake made in an (electronic) milk form, these reports often do not contain enough information and details to attribute the cause of the meditation error to the influence of the computer system. In addition, the cause must often be sought in combination of factors. The user-friendliness of a computer system and high workload or inexperience, for example.
The researchers made two overviews for the entire medication process, from prescription to use. Of all factors that can contribute to medication errors due to user-unfriendly computer systems and of awkwardly designed parts of computer systems. With the help of these overviews, the influence of user-unfriendly computer systems in the occurrence of errors with medicines should become more transparent.
Prevention is better than cure
The prevention of meditation errors is a subject that has been worked on for many years. In addition to well-organized processes, the use of new (digital) techniques and systems also plays an important role. Like the medication safety system MedEye, which has prevented many thousands of medication errors since its introduction in 2016.
But also sharing information about medication errors can make an important contribution to preventing them. Learn from each other’s mistakes. A few years ago it became clear that it was exactly that lack of information sharinge about medication use can lead to more errors.
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