Free-text entry for medication orders continues to be frequent, occurring approximately 9 percent of the time, according to one study published in the proceedings of the annual meeting of the American Medical Informatics Association.
Researchers examined computerized provider medication order entry for more than 2,000 patients who received hypoglycemic medication an ambulatory setting during 2010. They found 9.3 percent of orders were entered in an unstructured fashion, with 17.4 percent of free-text orders containing misspellings.
Urgent care clinics had the highest proportion of free-text entries in the study, at 49.4 percent, while registered nurses were most often responsible for entering free-text medication orders, at 31.5 percent. Additionally, 92 drug interaction alerts were not triggered in the electronic health record because of free-text, rather than structured, entry methods.
The study concluded focusing on structured data entry for medication orders is vital to patient safety.
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