Decision support for medication use in an inpatient physician order entry application and a pharmacy application.

Studies have shown that adverse drug events are common, expensive, and due to causes that can be remedied by information technologies. At our institution we have developed a physician order entry application and a pharmacy application designed to decrease the risk of such adverse drug events. In this paper, we describe the applications, with attention to the clinical decision support features present in each. We also describe the manner in which the two applications interact.