Electronic Prescribing Overview
It is estimated that approximately 7,000 deaths occur each year in the United States due to medication errors. These errors are predominately due to hand-writing illegibility, wrong dosing, missed drug-drug or drug-allergy reactions. E-prescribing is being touted as the solution to improved patient safety and reducing sky-rocketing medication costs.
What is e-prescribing?
Electronic prescribing is an electronic way to generate prescriptions through an automated system over the internet that transmits to a network which links to participating pharmacies.
Benefits of e-prescribing:
- Improving patient safety and overall quality of care - Illegible hand-written prescriptions are eliminated, decreasing the risk of medication errors and decreasing liability risks.
- Reducing or eliminating phone calls and call-backs to pharmacies - Physician offices are overwhelmed by call-backs from pharmacies with questions, clarifications and refill requests.
- Increases patient compliance - Approximately 20% of paper prescriptions go unfilled by the patient. E-prescribing systems expedite the filling of prescription at the pharmacy.
- Improving Formulary adherence. By checking with insurance company formularies, generic substitutions are encouraged thus reducing patient costs.
- Improves reporting ability. Prescription reporting would be impossible with a paper prescription system. Electronic prescriptions can be easily reported on such as:
- finding all patients who have had a particular medication prescribed to them during a drug recall
- the frequency of medication prescribed by certain providers etc.
What your practice needs to do to get started e-prescribing:
Electronic prescriptions are tightly integrated to EMR software. Therefore, to achieve the full benefits of
ePrescribing, consider it as part of a complete EMR implementation.
Part of the complete medical office suite
Our integrated EMR, ePrescribing and Practice Management solutions offer the best value for your medical practice.
Confused about the choices? Contact our consultants to get more information Call 800-955-0321 or click here |
