[Can new technologies reduce the rate of medications errors in adult intensive care?]

In the intensive care environment, technology is omnipresent to ensure the monitoring and the administration of critical drugs to unstable patients. Since the early 2000's computerized physician order entry (CPOE), bar code assisted medication administration (BCMA), "smart" infusion pumps (SIP), electronic medication administration record (eMAR) and automated dispensing systems (ADS) have been recommended to reduce medication errors. About ten years later, their implementation rises but remains modest. The objective of this study is to determine the impact of these technologies on the rate of medication errors (ME) in adult intensive care. CPOE allows a strong and significant reduction of ME, especially the least critical ones. Only when adding a clinical decision support system (CDSS), CPOE could allow a reduction of serious errors. Used alone, it could even increase them. The available studies do not have the sufficient power to demonstrate the benefits of SIP or BCMA on ME. However, these devices, reveal practices, such as overriding of alerts. Power or methodology problems and conflicting results do not allow to determine the ability of ADS to reduce the incidence of ME in the intensive care. The studies, investigating these technologies, are not very recent, of limited number and present lacks in their methodology, which does not allow to determine whether they can reduce the incidence of MEs in the adult intensive care. Currently, the benefits appear to be limited which may be explained by the complexity of their integration into the care process. Special attention should be given to the communication between caregivers, the human-computer interface and the caregivers' training.