Despite what you’ve been told all these years, your dreadful handwriting is not the only cause of prescription mistakes. In fact, a recent study suggests that outpatient computer-generated prescriptions may be just as error-prone as your old paper versions.

That study found that nearly 12% of the computer-generated prescription—all of them from nonhospital physician offices—included at least one error, and more than one-third of those had potential for harm, according to the clinical panel reviewing them. That is not much different from paper systems, according to the researchers.

The retrospective cohort study, funded by a grants from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Harvard Risk Management Foundation, looked at 3,850 computer-generated prescriptions from three pharmacy chain outlets in Arizona, Florida, and Massachusetts over a four-week period in 2008.

The most common error was omitted information, which accounted for more than 60% of all mistakes.

The takeaway for primary care physicians is to make sure that your system is programmed with safeguards to help you avoid common errors, such as omitted dosages, incomplete drug names, or unclear instructions.

“Implementing a computerized prescribing system without comprehensive functionality and processes in place to ensure meaningful system use does not decrease medication errors,” according to the researchers who, in addition to programming changes, also recommended systems with built-in dosage calculators to reduce mathematical errors.

Of course, one study does not a trend make. Other studies have found that e-prescribing is very effective in reducing errors. Last year, researchers reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that electronic prescriptions can reduce prescribing errors up to 7-fold.

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