The effect of a technological intervention on the prevention of medication errors

Abstract

Medication errors account for multiple adverse patient outcomes each year, including death (Sakowski, Leonard, Colburn, Michaelsen, Schiro, Schneider, & Newman, 2005). Traditional medication administration processes rely on human review alone. The implementation of the Bar-code point-of-care (BPOC) medication administration system may reduce the number of medication errors that occur. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of a Bar-code point-of-care (BPOC) medication administration system on the incidence of medication administration errors in a network of acute-care, community hospitals. Systems theory (von Bertalanffy, 1968) provides the conceptual framework for the study, which is a replication of Sakowski et al.'s (2005) study. The sample will include 25 adult inpatient units from four hospitals belonging to the same health network. Data will be collected by retrospective audits of BPOC records that include reports of generated warning and errors and all attempted medication administrations, obtained on randomly selected days. Data analysis will determine user response to system warnings as well as actual and prevented medication administration errors. This study may provide information about the patterns of medication errors in hospitals that use a BPOC system.