He was responding to questions from the Otago Daily Times after the recent finding from Southern regional coroner David Crerar into the 2008 death of a woman who died in the hospital from an extremely rare and severe reaction to an antibiotic prescribed by a GP.
Mr Crerar expressed concern that known allergies were not continually charted on the woman's records and recommended the hospital give attention to addressing problems with charting drugs and recording adverse reactions and cross reactions.
There are plans to extend the electronic prescribing system, tested in some wards at Dunedin Hospital, to wards throughout the hospital, as well as to Southland Hospital in Invercargill, and Dunstan and Balclutha hospitals. However, the time this might take and the cost of it have not been announced.
Under the system, if medication allergies are listed for a patient, the prescribing doctor is automatically alerted to these and would have to deliberately override the caution to prescribe the medicine concerned.
This could occur, depending on the patient's condition and the previous severity of the allergy. A distinction needed to be drawn between an expected side effect of a drug and a true allergy, Dr Bowers said.
He agreed the effectiveness of any such system depended on the accuracy of the information recorded.
If patients knew they had an allergy it was a good idea to make sure those treating them knew about it, and patients would be asked about it when being admitted to hospital.
The daughter of the woman involved in the recent case expressed concern, when giving evidence at the coroner's hearing, that during an earlier episode of her mother's treatment in Dunedin Hospital (not the occasion of her death) the family's allergy concerns had not been heeded.
Dr Bowers, who is an internal medicine specialist, said information from families should be taken seriously and people should not be frightened to come forward.
In instances where people or their families were unable to provide information and there were no records, hospital doctors could only refer to what information was held on the patient in the national medical warning system.
However, while it was "a lot better than it used to be", there were concerns about the accuracy of much of the data held in the system, which was not always specific enough to aid the prescribing doctor, and doctors might choose to ignore it.
There are plans to upgrade the system, something which Dr Bowers welcomed.
One of the drawbacks of the system until now had been that GPs had not been able to access it.
Dr Bowers, who is is also clinical IT leader for the alliance of South Island district health boards, said all five DHBs were working towards the electronic charting of medicines by the end of 2014.
It is estimated at least 150 deaths a year occur from all types of medication errors in New Zealand hospitals. Dr Bowers said it was expected if all hospitals used the electronic prescribing system the deaths and other harm caused by errors could be reduced by about half.
It was hard to "get a good handle" on the amount of harm caused by medication errors in the community setting because of its complexity.
Work is also being done on ways to improve the recording of the medications patients are taking in the community, with plans to record all medications a patient is taking at one source, which could be accessed by patients, GPs, pharmacists and hospitals.
