The following
study was performed to identify factors related to medication errors
in the computerized physician order entry and their advantages and
disadvantages according to doctors, nursing team and administrative
officers. It is a survey descriptive study carried out at three
units of a Brazilian academic hospital in the southeast area. The
study was divided in two phases. In the first phase, we analyzed
a total of 1,349 prescriptions from general medical unit, surgical
and orthopaedic wards during 30 days consecutively. A semi-structured
instrument, elaborated by a group of researchers for the study proposals,
was used. In the second phase, a semi-structured questionnaire was
applied to the health professionals containing closed and open items
approaching their opinion about the composition of electronic prescription,
the advantages and disadvantages of them, and their suggestions
for its improvement. Out of 1,349 prescriptions observed, 17.5%
presented deletions, 25.0% medicines written manually and 17.0%
of them were incomplete. Some of the advantages pointed by health
professionals were its legibility (37.5%), little time spent when
elaborating and emitting them (20.5%) and the way they are a practical
and organized (8%). The disadvantages pointed were repetition of
previous prescriptions (34%), typing mistakes (17%), dependence
on computers (11%) and alterations made manually (7%). We conclude,
this way, that the computerized prescription order entry represents
a great progress among the strategies used to minimize medication
errors caused by prescriptions badly formulated. However, it doesn't
eradicate the possibility of medication error occurrences, needing
some system modifications.
