A Systematic Review on the Strategies and Techniques for Decreasing Prescribing Errors

Abstract

Prescribing errors can lead to tragic consequences in the modern health care systems. The prescribing process faces many barriers that cause limitations, such as information and communications technology (ICT) shortcomings, high workload, complex polypharmacy,patient factors, lack of standardization, and frequent rotations of inexperienced physicians on the wards. Therefore, several strategies and tools were introduced to face this problem, including computerized physician order entry (CPOE), education and training of the prescribers, and expanding the role of the clinical pharmacist.In this systematic review, we are going to address the studies which discussed the different strategies to minimize the prescribing errors. Also, the outcomes and the limitations of each strategy will be discussed throughout this review.Because of the limitations of the application of each strategy separately, it is concluded that the integration between them can lead to overcoming each technique"s drawbacks and enhance the decrease in the prescribing errors.