To reduce medication errors, Hunter New England Health (HNEH) has licensed First DataBank electronic drug information for integration across hospital information systems.

As part of a HNEH wide strategy to streamline medication management and reduce medication errors, FDB’s electronic drug catalogue will be integrated across its hospital information systems.

FDB’s clinical decision support used within computerised physician order entry systems helps reduce the risk of medication errors by providing active clinical checking at the point of prescribing including drug-drug interactions, contraindications and precautions, sensitivities and duplicate therapy.

HNEH, part of New South Wales Health, provides care for 840,000 people across a large, geographical area. Starting from October 2009,HNEH in-patient wards will use the FDB drug terminology when discharging patients.

Staff will be able to quickly and easily produce a comprehensive list of a patient’s medications that is consistent, unambiguous and free of other terminology related errors. Complete and accurate discharge documentation helps to ensure that patients and theirGPs have a clear picture of current medications.

The rollout across HNEH of full electronic prescribing for discharge medications is planned in 2010. Medical staff will then have access to comprehensive drug information on thousands of prescription drugs including side effects, drug interactions, official warnings and alerts, and medical conditions associated with specific drugs. For the first time clinicians will be able to consider relevant drug information whilst prescribing a course of treatment or offering guidance to a patient.

“Medication errors occur at an alarming rate in Australian hospitals - affecting at least 2.4% of admissions or some 164,000 patients annually. Major contributing factors are confusion arising from inconsistent terminology and a lack of drug information during prescribing. The implementation at HNEH will help to alleviate some of the errors that occur every day in Australian hospitals” says Chung Liauw, Managing Director, First DataBank Australia.

Chris Kurtz, HNEH Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Program Manager adds: “The first step towards a reduction in medication errors is improved online documentation. By providing clinicians with more interoperable systems and the very best drug information at the point of data entry, we have taken that first step - and laid the foundation for more advanced decision support in the future.”