Characteristics of pharmacist’s interventions triggered by prescribing errors related to computerised physician order entry in French hospitals: a cross-sectional observational study

Objectives Computerised physician order entry (CPOE) systems facilitate the review of medication orders by pharmacists. Reports have emerged that show conception flaws or the misuse of CPOE systems generate prescribing errors. We aimed to characterise pharmacist interventions (PIs) triggered by prescribing errors identified as system-related errors (PISREs) in French hospitals.Design This was a cross-sectional observational study based on PIs prospectively documented in the Act-IP observatory database from January 2014 to December 2018.Setting PISREs from 319 French computerised healthcare facilities were analysed.Participants Among the 319 French hospitals, 232 (72.7%) performed SRE interventions, involving 652 (51%) pharmacists.Results Among the 331 678 PIs recorded, 27 058 were qualified as due to SREs (8.2%). The main drug-related problems associated with PISREs were supratherapeutic (27.5%) and subtherapeutic dosage (17.2%), non-conformity with guidelines/contraindications (22.4%) and improper administration (17.9%). The PI prescriber acceptation rate was 78.9% for SREs vs 67.6% for other types of errors. The PISRE ratio was estimated relative to the total number of PIs. Concerning the certification status of CPOE systems, the PISRE ratio was 9.4% for non-certified systems vs 5.5% for certified systems (p