>I had to make a visit to the emergency room over christmas. To my surprise, the prescriptions were printed out by computer. As long as the doctor selected or entered the correct drug and dosage from the database, the computer printed it out for the pharmacy. That was in the Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro. However, the military has been doing this for years. A doctor has to select a drug from a database and an approved dosage and the prescription is printed and goes directly to the screen at the pharmacy. You walk over to the pharmacy (it is in the same building) and your prescriptions are usually already ready and waiting for you.
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Believe it or not, sometimes automated prescription systems are the cause of medication errors: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/293/10/1197

Of course, this is due to bad interaction design, but we need to remember that computerizing is not a absolute cure for such problems.

Tamar