EHRs not a fail-safe to prevent medication errors

Electronic health records (EHR) are becoming increasingly common in health systems, and one of the purported advantages of implementation is protection from medication safety events, including medication errors. American researchers used data from a national, longitudinal sample of 1527 hospitals in the USA over 7 years who took a safety performance assessment test using simulated medication orders. Average hospital EHR systems correctly prevented only 54.0% of potential adverse drug events tested on the 44-order safety performance assessment in 2009 and this increased to 61.6% in 2016. Efforts to participate in voluntary self-assessment and improvement did appear to be helpful in improving medication safety performance.There remains a great deal of room for improvement in EHR medication safety systems – organisations cannot rely on EHRs to prevent medication errors – it would appear that pharmacists would be able to address this issue. See here for more details.