Its principal use in hospital practice has been for outpatient or inpatient discharge prescriptions, although some hospitals use fully integrated computerised prescribing systems.
Electronic prescribing (ePrescribing) systems are now well established in UK primary care, 1 2 but widespread adoption of fully computerised prescribing systems has to date only been achieved in a few UK hospitals.
7 8 Computerised prescribing systems integrated with clinical decision support systems could serve as a means to more effectively prescribe psychotropic medications because these systems have been found to prevent medication errors by providing physicians with alerts at the point of prescribing.
This finding, while new, fits with prior observations on the high frequency of overriding computerised prescribing alerts by physicians.
A recent review of the evidence on computerised prescribing decision-support systems concludes that these perform better in institutional rather than ambulatory settings, and when decision support is initiated automatically by the system as opposed to user initiation [ 57].
In the USA, widely perceived as leading the field in hospital computerised prescribing, less than 10% of hospitals are reported [ 8] to have electronic systems.
7 8 While computerised prescribing has been commonplace in UK primary care for some time, until recently there has been no system for transferring prescriptions electronically to community pharmacies, and prescriptions were, instead, printed out and taken by hand.
Computerised prescribing is widely used in the United Kingdom for repeat prescriptions in general practice [ 1].
The pharmaceutical error rate (0.16%) appeared to be very low compared with a similar study focused on the preparation process (3.6% of pharmaceutical errors) [ 32] and also lower than another study using a totally computerised chemotherapy prescribing system (0.45%) [ 33].
Further studies with mandatory, computerised checklists within the prescribing system need to be carried out to show compliance and sustainable results over a longer period of time.
