Report: Logging errors improves care quality

Researchers at Johns Hopkins released a study that concludes requiring doctors and nurses to report medication errors and log them in a database improves care quality and decreases the chances that providers will make mistakes. The research, which appears in the June issue of the journal Quality & Safety in Healthcare, looked at mistakes at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center. In the study, researchers found errors occur during every step of the medication process and that doctors, nurses and pharmacists made mistakes at about the same rates.

"One of the more interesting findings was that drug-administering errors, such as giving the patient the wrong drug or the wrong dose or at the wrong time, were quite common," said Christoph Lehmann, director of clinical IT at Children's. "We had focused in the past on ordering errors. This finding made us look for possible interventions on the administration side."

- see this release from Johns Hopkins