Our digital overlords are increasingly pervasive in medicine. In many respects, the advances of computerized provider order-entry are profoundly useful: some otherwise complex orders are facilitated, serious drug-interactions can be checked, along with a small cadre of other benefits. But, we’ve all encountered its limitations, as well.
This is a qualitative descriptive study of medication errors occurring despite the presence of CPOE. This prospective FDA-sponsored project identified 2,522 medication errors across six hospitals, 1,308 of which were related to CPOE. These errors fell into two main categories: CPOE failed to prevent the error (86.9%) and CPOE facilitated the error (13.1%).
CPOE-facilitated errors are most obvious. For example, these include instances in which an order set was out-of-date, and a non-formulary medication order resulted in delayed care for a patient; interface issues resulting in mis-clicks or misreads; or instances in which CPOE content was simply erroneous.
More interesting, however, are the “failed to prevent the error” issues – which are things like dose-checking and interaction-checking failures. The issue here is not specifically the CPOE, but that providers have become so dependent upon the CPOE to be a reliable safety mechanism that we’ve given up agency to the machine. We are bombarded by so many nonsensical alerts, we’ve begun to operate under an assumption that any order failing to anger our digital nannies must be accurate. These will undoubtedly prove to be the most challenging errors to stamp out, particularly as further cognitive processes are offloaded to automated systems.
“Computerized prescriber order entry– related patient safety reports: analysis of 2522 medication errors”
http://jamia.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/09/27/jamia.ocw125