e-Prescribing, I need more e-prescribing

To steal a line from Saturday Night Live and the great Christopher Walken; "Cowbell, I need more cowbell!" That's pretty much how I feel when it comes to e-prescribing and it's positive impacts on health care and more specifically, pharmacy. For those of us who work at a retail pharmacy, we all know how much of a headache it is having to handle and process oftentimes hundreds of prescriptions a day, especially when the majority of them are illegible works of art. Something as simple as one illegible prescription can throw a monkey wrench into your workflow, especially when your short staffed and juggling 100 balls at the same time. Having to stop one process to call a doctor for clarification on a prescription can be quite annoying, especially when you're put on hold. Since e-prescriptions still make up a small portion of our daily script counts, most of us will be living with these tedious headaches for a little longer.


So what exactly is e-prescribing? Simply put, it's an electronic way to generate prescriptions through an automated data-entry process. This process utilizes specific software and a transmission network which links the physician to the pharmacies. E-prescribing has been described as a vital solution to helping to improve patient safety and reduce our ever sky-rocketing medication costs. It is estimated that roughly 7,000 patients die a year in the U.S due to medication errors, with a large portion of such errors due to poorly written prescriptions and missed drug-drug interactions. This is just a complete unnecessary risk and using hand-written paper based methods for such vital information is primitive in my mind.

To better understand the impact of e-prescribing, let's break down it's impact on health care:

1) Improves patient safety and overall quality of care by eliminating errors associated with illegible prescriptions.
2) E-prescribing systems have built in DUR warning/alert systems that can immediately detect drug-drug interactions, allergic reactions, contraindications, duplicate therapies, etc.
3) Software has the ability to sync patient medical records and alert for any drug inappropriatness.
4) Huge reduction in pharmacy phone calls to physician and call-backs. It is estimated that out of the 3 billion prescriptions a year, 30% of those result in a pharmacy contacted the physician for clarification of some sort. This equates to massive amounts of wasted time and energy on the part of the physician as well as the pharmacy.
5) Eliminate faxes to pharmacies
6) Streamline refill requests and authorization processes. We all know how utterly mind-numbing this process is and how it affects patient satisfaction and medication adherence.
7) The provider has absolute mobility to authorize prescriptions anytime and anywhere using e-prescribing software.
8) Overall flexibility, convenience and cost savings is a no-brainer.

We have the technology to achieve all of this, unfortunately it's a matter of integrating and expanding the e-prescribing services into every provider across the country. Most providers have yet to adopt e-prescribing, until they do, the pharmacy and most importantly the patient will be feeling the burden.


http://www.emrconsultant.com/education/e-prescribing