This thesis presents the issues of electronic prescribing in the hospital environment in order to reduce adverse drug events that are caused by medication errors.
Various studies confirmed that medication errors are the leading cause for prolonging the healing process, disability, and sometimes even death among hospitalized patients and represent significant increase of costs for the health system.
Most frequent medication errors are incorrect dose, wrong medication, medicine administered too late or medicine administrated to the wrong patient. These errors are caused by various reasons: illegible or incomplete handwritten prescription; missing information about drug history; failure to comply with the patient's allergies, ignoring side effects due to drug interactions.
Computerized physician order entry (CPOE) together with a decision support system (drug interactions checking, dose calculations, allergy checking) can improve patient safety, reduce medication errors, optimize work processes in all stages of medication process (prescribing, ordering, dispensing, administration and monitoring).
Special attention is given to the review of literature dealing with lessons learned from implementations of electronic prescribing system in various hospitals. The thesis also reviews articles that propose guidelines for optimizing the system and eliminating unintended medication errors related to the system itself.
The key contribution of this work is an architectural model of electronic prescribing system. The motivational model presents the goals and objectives of the electronic prescribing implementation. The key medication processes are also presented emphasising the value and benefits of electronic prescribing.
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