ePrescribing
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0 New National Drug Safety Program Implemented in Sweden
Jan 8, 2010. ePrescribing.Apoteket, Sweden’s largest pharmacy chain, and Medco Health Solutions, Inc. recently announced the development of Elektroniskt ExpeditionsStod (EES), one of the first national centralized drug utilization review (DUR) programs outside of the United States. This program is intended to improve prescription safety by reducing adverse drug events and thereby reducing the drug related hospitalizations. In Sweden, about 30 percent of emergency care visits and 10 percent of all hospital admissions are the result of preventable adverse drug related events.
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0 The E-prescribing Boom
Nov 12, 2009. News, ePrescribing.E-prescribing is one important component of EHRs. Retail pharmacies are realizing the potential for e-prescribing to increase their safety and productivity, such as Walgreens. The national pharmacy chain’s electronic prescriptions recently reached 4 million in October 2009, a 185-percent increase from the year prior.
It is projected that Walgreens will fill more than 45 million electronic prescriptions in 2009, compared with 15 million filled in 2008. The company expects growth to continue with help from financial incentives in the federal stimulus package, which encourages hospitals, doctors and others to adopt electronic health records, of which e-prescribing is a key component.
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0 Incentives for EHR Adoption: Pay Now or Pay Later
Nov 9, 2009. Government Initiatives, Health Information Technology, ePrescribing.The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) has announced that starting January 2010, healthcare providers will have the option to use electronic health record systems to report Medicare quality and electronic prescribing measures to CMS in some of its pay-for-performance programs. The revisions are designed “to promote adoption and use of electronic health records and to provide both eligible professionals and CMS with experience on EHR-based reporting,” said CMS.
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0 Incentive Payments for E-prescribing
Nov 3, 2009. ePrescribing.In its attempts to widely disperse and advocate the use of electronic prescribing (or more popularly known as e-prescribing), the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has begun providing incentive payments of up to 2 percent to eligible physicians and other health care providers using this technology for the year 2009.
According to the Medicare E-prescribing Incentive Program, prescribers using a qualified e-prescribing system began receiving payments from Medicare starting January 1, 2009. As the years progress, the reward will drop. For 2011, the 2 percent would become 1 percent and further down to 0.5 percent two years later. Eventually, the incentives would be gone by the year 2013 when it is expected that the technology has been completely adapted.
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2 E-Prescribing in Rhode Island: Connecting Public Health and Clinical Medicine
Oct 28, 2009. ePrescribing.Public health and clinical medicine have different models of care. While little similarities exist between them, health IT may finally present a common thread.
The core principles of public health are focused on preventing and reducing the burden of disease on communities or entire populations. Public health is concerned with health and wellness; prevention of disease; reduction of morbidity and mortality; and identifying and isolating health threats to populations.
The most recent example of public health in action is the identification, control and prevention of the H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) pandemic. Public health professionals must identify and track each case of H1N1 to first, determine how the disease is spreading; second, ascertain how to isolate it; and third, strategize the development and deployment of a vaccine.
Clinical medicine is more concerned with individual health. A physician might receive a rationed number of H1N1 vaccines and disperse the vaccine as a prevention strategy to high-risk patients. Most of clinical medicine is focused on diagnosing and treating disease. If a patient presents to the physician with symptoms of H1N1, they do the blood testing to confirm the diagnosis, and if the results are positive, provide drug therapy to treat the H1N1 virus.
As you can see, it takes both public health professionals and clinical medicine practitioners to both PREVENT and TREAT disease. But because they have different models of care, it’s sometimes difficult for the two disciplines to play nicely together. However, looking at a case study of Rhode Island’s health IT developments, it seems technology in e-prescribing has brought them into accord.
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1 Error reduction and efficiency through E-prescribing (E-Rx)
Oct 12, 2009. ePrescribing.Electronic prescribing is a replacement of the traditional method used by physicians to manually write down the medications for patient. This application allows health practitioners to electronically send a prescription directly to a pharmacy of patient’s choice. Transfer of information is done over a secure network that ensures privacy of individuals and rapidly connects the physician’s computer to the pharmacy.
E-Rx also allows physicians to access patient’s prescription drug benefits information and their prescription medication history. Now patients can avoid visiting the healthcare facility for prescription refills as electronic prescribing allows a pharmacist to send an electronic renewal request to physicians when patients run out of refills.
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1 New features added to the E-prescribing module of CareTracker EMR solution from Ingenix
Oct 8, 2009. ePrescribing.Ingenix, the healthcare technology subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, has announced the addition of new features to the electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) functionality of its CareTracker EMR solution. The new Surescripts certified features will allow CareTracker users quick and easy to access patient medication histories and drug benefit information at the point of care.
E-prescribing is a process by which medical practitioners generate and transmit prescriptions electronically to participating pharmacies. Considering that medication errors are responsible for approximately 7,000 deaths each year in the US, e-prescribing offers an effective way of eliminating errors due to illegible hand-writing of physicians, wrong dosage, and missed drug-to-drug or drug-to-allergy reactions.
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0 New Research Reveals Effectiveness of E-Prescribing
Sep 21, 2009. News, ePrescribing.Study: e-prescribing prevents errors even if doctors override most alerts
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FierceHealthIT
In a study conducted by Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, researchers have concluded that drug interaction alerts in ambulatory e-prescribing systems are effective at reducing both adverse drug events and medical costs. -
0 e-Prescribing Helps Doctors Pick Cheaper Drugs
Dec 10, 2008. News, ePrescribing.e-Prescribing Helps Doctors Pick Cheaper Drugs
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InjuryBoard.com
Only six percent of U.S. doctors currently use “e-prescribing” although doing so may improve efficiency and reduce medication errors such as a pharmacy technician misreading a doctor’s messy handwriting or dispensing a different drug with a similar name. -
0 Updates on eRX or e-Prescribing
Nov 3, 2008. News, ePrescribing.Updates on eRX or e-Prescribing
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Keely’s Blog
Here is a good document on eRX that also summarizes the legislation going on in this area. Note that, “E-prescribing has been the subject of a significant amount of attention recently from Congress, after the introduction of legislation in both the House and the Senate that would provide financial incentives and disincentives for e-prescribing by ambulatory physicians under the Medicare program.
