Incentives Push More Doctors to E-Prescribe

Electronic Systems Shown to Reduce Dangerous Errors; A Cure for Poor Penmanship

With a host of new incentives, doctors are finally beginning to scrap pen and paper in favor of electronic prescriptions.

Medicare began paying doctors a bonus if they switch their patients over to e-prescribing. Some private health plans also have begun offering extra payments along with free equipment, such as digital handheld devices. And a coalition of technology companies is giving doctors free software to encourage them to ditch their paper prescription pads. As a result, the number of physicians prescribing medicines electronically has more than doubled in the past year to about 70,000, or about 12% of all office-based doctors.

E-prescribing allows doctors to transmit prescriptions via a secure Internet network directly to pharmacies using an office or laptop computer or a digital handheld device. The practice has been shown in studies to reduce prescription errors and to cut costs for consumers and health-care providers. It also encourages patients to get more of their prescriptions filled, because it reduces the time spent waiting at drug stores. The Obama administration’s plan to invest $50 billion over five years to encourage broader adoption of health-information technology is expected to include additional incentives for electronic prescribing.

But there are still barriers to full-fledged adoption of e-prescribing. Federal drug laws, which are under review, prohibit electronic prescribing of controlled medications such as narcotics, insomnia drugs and anti-depressants. Safety experts also warn that selecting prescriptions on a computer screen can cause a doctor to inadvertently enter, for instance, a quick-release version of a drug instead of a long-acting formulation because they appear in sequence on an e-prescribing program. http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/incentives-push-doctors-eprescribe/