Cost of Poor E-Prescribing Quality: Medication Errors and Rework in Mental Health

Key Findings

• Financial Impact: Multi-institutional analyses of electronic prescribing note that poor default settings, confusing interfaces, and inadequate decision support lead to preventable prescribing errors, which in turn require corrective encounters and sometimes emergency care; while specific dollar figures for mental health only are not isolated, medication error events in ambulatory settings are widely documented as a significant driver of avoidable cost.
• Frequency: Daily
• Root Cause: Health policy research on e‑prescribing safety identifies multiple systemic issues: lack of standardized, user‑friendly sigs (instructions), problematic drop‑down lists and defaults, and inadequate decision support for drug–drug, drug–disease, and drug–allergy interactions, all of which lead to errors or near misses in outpatient prescribing.[7] For psychotropic medications, which are often adjusted frequently and combined with other medications, these interface and decision‑support failures drive repeat phone calls, refaxed or retransmitted prescriptions, and additional visits to correct problems—direct cost to clinicians’ time and potential indirect cost from adverse events or malpractice exposure.