Doctors are famous for sloppy scribbling — and handwritten prescriptions lead to thousands of medication errors each year. Electronics to the rescue: U.S. hospitals that switched to computerized physician order entry systems saw a 66 percent drop in prescription errors, according to a new review of studies.

Despite widespread capacity to provide prescription medication labels in languages other than English, few New York City pharmacies do so and as a result, limited-English patients face serious risk of medication error, according to a study by The New York Academy of Medicine presented today at the annual meeting of the Society for General Internal Medicine (SGIM) in Toronto, Ontario.

High workloads for pharmacists increase the potential for medication errors, says a new study by University of Arizona College of Pharmacy researchers published in the May issue of the journal Medical Care.

Medication errors appear to be common, often hidden and associated with adverse events among patients receiving outpatient care after an organ transplant, according to a report in the March issue of Archives of Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The health care system is involved with nearly one-third of these errors.