Measuring the rate of manual transcription error in outpatient point-of-care testing. (10th January 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mays, James A; Mathias, Patrick C
• Is Part Of: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Volume 26:Number 3(2019)
• Page Start: 269
• Page End: 272
• Publication Date: 2019-01-10
• Subjects: clinical laboratory information systems -- point-of-care testing -- medical errors -- laboratories -- electronic health records; Medical informatics -- Periodicals; Information Services -- Periodicals; Medical Informatics -- Periodicals; Médecine -- Informatique -- Périodiques; Informatica; Geneeskunde; Informatique médicale; Computer network resources; Electronic journals; 610.285
• DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocy170
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1067-5027

Abstract

Abstract: Many point-of-care laboratory tests are manually entered into the electronic health record by ambulatory clinic staff, but the rate of manual transcription error for this testing is poorly characterized. Using a dataset arising from a duplicated workflow that created a set of paired interfaced and manually entered point-of-care glucose measurements, we found that 260 of 6930 (3.7%) manual entries were discrepant from their interfaced result. Thirty-seven of the 260 (14.2%) errors were discrepant by more than 20% and included potentially dangerous mistranscriptions. An additional 37 (14.2%) errors were due to inclusion of non-numeric characters. Staff-entered result flags deviated from the result flag generated in the laboratory information system in 5121 of 6930 (73.9%) pairs. These data demonstrate that clinically significant discrepancies for clinic-entered point of care results occurred at a rate of approximately 5 per 1000 results and they underline the importance of interfacing instruments when feasible.