A comparison of medication administrations errors using CPOE orders vs. handwritten orders for pediatric continuous drug infusions.

Continuous drug infusions in critically ill patients are associated with a high error rate. Although CPOE systems have shown to reduce prescribing errors, the effect on administration errors has not been studied in pediatric ICU patients. We studied this by measuring the ability of nurses to detect medication administration errors using CPOE orders versus handwritten orders for continuous drug infusions.