One in every 10 patients admitted to six Massachusetts community hospitals suffered serious and avoidable medication mistakes, according to a report being released today by two nonprofit groups that are urging all hospitals in the state to install a computerized prescription ordering system.

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The report is the first large-scale study of preventable prescription errors in community hospitals, and its author, Dr. David Bates of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said he was surprised that these mistakes were so frequent in these community hospitals. Previous studies in large academic hospitals that also lacked computerized systems found such medication errors occurred less than half as often, he said.

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