There’s quite a bit of talk floating around the internet about a recent article in JAMIA that looks at reduction of medication errors in hospitals secondary to CPOE adoption (J Am Med Inform Assoc doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2012-001241). The article is available for free so I read through it last weekend. By the end I was looking at something that wasn’t all that impressive. The authors use a lot of sleight of hand, i.e. statistical models to tell a story about how CPOE “decreases the likelihood of error on that order by 48%â€, which ultimately could potentially lead to a reduction in medication errors by approximately 12.5%â€. That would be great, except that the entire thing is based on statistical models, assumptions, survey data and a great big meta-analysis.
Continue reading CPOE reduces likelihood of error by nearly 50% [article]? I’m skeptical