A study that was carried out by a group of researchers from the University of New South Wales has revealed that medication prescribing errors are possible to be reduced. The study researchers said that electronic prescribing technology is the tool to manage the errors.

Lead researcher Johanna Westbrook, from the UNSW’s Australian Institute of Health Innovation, said that the Australian hospitals could bring a decline in the number of prescription errors by up to 66%. This could happen if they start using commercial e-prescribing systems.

A lot of mistakes are being committed due to the conventional method of prescribing medicines. Westbrook said that they assessed 3,291 patient records and saw the mistakes at the two levels, namely procedural and clinical. It was revealed that 90% errors could be declined by using e-prescription techniques.

In order to prove their hypothesis, they conducted an investigation in which they installed e-prescription technique in the three departments of two Australian teaching hospitals. After assessing its efficacy for some days, they compared it with the conventional method.

It was concluded that prescribing errors could fall between 58% and 66%.Westbrook said that it would be the best option to bring a decline in the number of errors. Though efforts have been done to reduce these errors such as introduction of a standardized National Inpatient Medication Chart, improvement level is not up to the expected level.

Welcoming the findings of the research, a Professor of Pharmacology who helped in implementing the e-prescription technology at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital, Ric Day, said: “From a clinician’s point of view this is an incredible result given the prevalence and the intractability of the problem. It’s even more significant given that we expect to see greater reductions once user support is added to the systems”.