[Ensuring safe medication in the physician's office].

The risk of adverse drug reactions can be appreciably reduced by limiting prescribing practice to a manageable number of medications, exercising restraint with regard to new drugs, and using a computerized system for the documentation of drug prescriptions. In order to further improve patient safety in this area appropriate efforts need to be made by medical self-administration, politicians and the computer industry to develop and apply computer-based prescription systems, with the additional requirement that their integration into existing doctor's office software should be simple and user-friendly, as well as free from "industrial contamination".