[To know, understand and combating medication errors related to computerized physician order entry]

Introduction: The aim of the study is to identify medication errors related to computerized physician order entry in our hospital.

Methods: At the end of this 1-year study (2008 to 2009), 378 beds were computerized by a business software. Medication errors were identified from notifications sent to the publisher of the software, feedback of health professionals and the analysis of Pharmacists' interventions formulate following prescription errors due to computerization. They were qualified according to the medication error's French dictionary of the French Society of Clinical Pharmacy.

Results: Thirty-five categories of medication errors were found. Most of them appear during prescription. Dosage and concentration errors, dose errors, omission errors and drug errors are the most frequent.

Discussion-conclusion: Three main causes were found: human factor, closely related to the software settings and the quality of user training; communication problems, related to the ergonomics; conception problems, related to intuitiveness and intricacy of the software. These results confirm the existence of medication errors induced by computerized physician order entry systems. They highlight the need to involve initial and ongoing training of users, relevance and scalability of the setup and use of mature and certified software to minimized them.