NEW YORK: Doctors at a California children s hospital have found the first evidence that using an electronic system to communicate their orders may save lives.

After the system was introduced in 2007, the hospital witnessed a 20-percent drop in mortality rate, the equivalent of 36 fewer deaths over a year and a half.

"It s the lowest rate ever observed in a children s hospital," said Dr. Chris Longhurst, of Stanford University and Lucile Packard Children s Hospital in Palo Alto, California, whose findings are published in the journal Pediatrics. "It begs the question how many lives could be rescued on a national level."

In 1999, a report from the Institute of Medicine blamed medical errors for between 44,000 and 98,000 deaths per year in the United States. Many hospitals have since introduced so-called computerized physician order entry, or CPOE, in an effort to lower that number.

Such systems allow doctors to relay prescriptions to pharmacists without delay, and without the need for the pharmacist to decipher doctors scrawl.

"What used to take 40 minutes or so now takes 20," Longhurst told Reuters Health.

Although close to three in ten U.S. hospitals use CPOE, no one had been able to show a decrease in mortality until now. In 2005, a Pittsburgh hospital even reported an increase in the number of child deaths after it implemented the system.

"There have been a couple of studies previously that have taken a similar approach and have found the opposite result" of the current study, said Nir Menachemi, an expert in health information technology and policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "I was more surprised by those studies."

The debate over whether CPOE is working as intended is hardly over, said Menachemi: "I think it would be foolish to believe that any one study can end the discussion."

According to Longhurst, what set Packard Children s Hospital apart was its careful and well-planned implementation of CPOE.