When doctors send prescriptions electronically, it’s supposed to make things safer. But e-prescribing errors, mistakes made when prescribing medication through digital systems. Also known as electronic prescribing errors, these glitches can lead to overdoses, dangerous drug interactions, or meds being sent to the wrong patient. The system was built to cut down on handwriting misreads and lost scripts—but it created new problems. A 2022 study from the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association found that nearly 1 in 5 e-prescriptions had at least one avoidable mistake, from wrong dosages to missing allergy alerts.
These errors don’t happen randomly. They cluster around prescribing software, the digital platforms doctors use to send prescriptions. Some systems force doctors to pick from dropdown menus that don’t match the exact drug or dose they want. Others don’t flag interactions between common meds like statins and azole antifungals—something we know can cause serious muscle damage. Even worse, alerts that pop up too often get ignored. If your doctor sees 20 fake warnings in an hour, they’ll start clicking past them without reading. That’s how a patient on warfarin ends up with a dangerous dose of ibandronate sodium, or someone with kidney issues gets hydrochlorothiazide without a dose adjustment.
medication safety, the practice of preventing harm from drugs during prescribing, dispensing, and taking isn’t just about the pills. It’s about how they’re ordered. A simple fix? Better drug libraries in the software. Clearer alerts. Less clutter. More human oversight. Many of the posts below show how small mistakes in prescribing—like confusing similar-sounding drugs or missing weight-based dosing—lead to big consequences. You’ll find real examples: how a misordered dose of betamethasone led to adrenal suppression, how a skipped allergy check caused a reaction to Bactroban, or how an e-script for roflumilast went to the wrong person because the system didn’t verify the patient’s ID.
These aren’t edge cases. They’re systemic. And they’re fixable. The posts here don’t just list problems—they show you what works: how to spot red flags in your own prescriptions, what questions to ask your pharmacist, and how to use tools like dissolution testing and medication storage rules to catch errors before they hurt you. Whether you’re managing COPD, osteoporosis, or just trying to avoid a bad reaction to an OTC nasal spray, understanding how e-prescribing errors happen gives you power. You’re not just a patient. You’re a checkpoint in the system. And that matters.
Transcription errors in e-prescribing systems are causing dangerous medication mistakes-even though digital prescriptions were meant to eliminate them. Learn the six proven strategies to stop these errors before they harm patients.
Nov, 16 2025
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