Reducing errors in discharge medication lists by using personal digital assistants.

This study examined whether the number of errors in discharge medication lists at a psychiatric hospital would decrease when the practice of transcribing the lists by hand from physicians' discharge orders was replaced by the use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) to create and directly print out such lists. In a four-month period before the use of PDAs was introduced, 20 of the 110 hand-transcribed lists (22 percent) contained errors. In the four-month period after the use of PDAs was implemented, seven of the 90 PDA-generated lists (8 percent) contained errors. Use of a PDA may be helpful in providing safer patient care.