Anyone who has tried to decipher a prescription written by their GP knows that doctors tend to have dreadful handwriting. But that sloppy script isn't just an odd quirk; it also leads to thousands of medication errors each year.

Computerized physician prescription entry systems are promising to bring an end to those errors and now a new study shows just how effective those systems can be.

Research suggests that up to 61 per cent of medication errors in hospitals are caused by illegible or inaccurately written prescriptions. A simple mistake such as putting the decimal point in the wrong place can have serious consequences because a patient's dosage could be 10 times the recommended amount.

Drugs with similar names are another common source of error, such as the pain medication Celebrex and the antidepressant Celexa, or the tranquilizer Zyprexa and the antihistamine Zyrtec.

Pharmacists, too, often have trouble reading doctor "chicken scratch" and frequently have to call the prescribing doctor to help them decipher the handwriting.

"Often physicians are writing prescriptions under pressures of time, and they can make careless errors, like writing 50 mg instead of 5 mg," explains study author Dr. Robert Kane of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health.

"What people don't realize is that from writing a prescription to filling an order, it may pass through five sets of hands."

Dr. Kane wanted to see what happened to error rates when hospitals used new computerized prescribing systems, in which drug orders are checked for spelling, accuracy dose and drug interactions.

Kane and research associate Tatyana Shamliyan looked at 12 U.S. studies that compared medication errors with handwritten prescriptions from in-hospital doctors and computerized prescriptions and found that computer prescribing:

• cut total prescribing errors by 66 per cent
• cut dosing errors by 43 per cent
• and reduced events in which patients were harmed by 37 per cent

The review of studies is published in the journal Health Services Research.

Kane says implementing computerized prescriptions is a simple step to protect the safety of hospital patients and should be implemented into more doctors' offices too.

Dr. Sarah Muttit, vice president of Innovation and Adoption with Canada Health Infoway says that a recent Commonwealth study showed that 11 per cent of GP's or primary care physicians are using e-prescribing, but Canada had the lowest rate in the countries surveyed.

And while 70 per cent of Alberta hospitals are using computerized prescribing systems, the rest of the country lags. Fifty-five per cent of Canadian hospitals say they are ready to implement the systems but not all are actually doing it.

"Our goal in the next five to 10 years is to move the system significantly forward toward computerization," says Muttit.

"We need to do more for the health and safety of Canadians."

With a report by CTV's Avis Favaro & Elizabeth St. Philip