Slide Presentation from the AHRQ 2007 Annual Conference

Research Conclusions

• The Everett Clinic / University of Washington a valuable partnership
• Medication errors
  • e-prescribing reduces medication errors
  • eliminates types of errors (illegibility, abbreviations)
  • introduces new types of errors (picking errors)
  • standardizes care / reduce unnecessary variation
  • data available to optimize quality & lower cost of prescribing
• Time-motion workload / workflow
  • e-prescribing has minimal impact on prescriber time (12 seconds per event)
• Workload
• 95% of prescriptions written electronically
• Number of monthly chart pulls decreased from
  • 5,800 (2003) to 650 (2007)—9-fold reduction
• Focus groups
  • impact beneficial—users do not wish to go back to paper-based prescribing