Electronic prescriptions move health care into digital future

At first, Dr. Marek Durakiewicz welcomed the opportunity to send prescriptions to drugstores electronically, using free computer equipment provided by a state pilot program.

Durakiewicz, the chief of staff at Hickman Community Hospital in Centerville, Tenn., recognized the potential benefits of “e-prescribing.” Special software allows doctors to see instantly if the drug they’re ordering is covered by a patient’s health insurance plan; if there’s a less expensive generic alternative; or if the patient is already taking medication that may interact dangerously with the new one.

For patients, there’s no piece of paper to misplace.

Advocates say e-prescribing is a key advance toward health care’s digital future because of its potential to reduce medical errors, cut drug costs and save doctors and patients time and money. E-prescribing is growing: The number of doctors doing it doubled last year to 74,000, according to an industry source. But kinks need to be worked out to spur more rapid acceptance.

Doctors, including Durakiewicz, and patients in a number of states have complaints. Malfunctioning hardware and cumbersome security features, such as software that logged him out automatically every 30 minutes, left him frustrated. Patient prescription histories provided by the system weren’t as current as he’d expected. In addition, federal restrictions prevented him from e-prescribing certain pain medications.

Now, a year later, he doesn’t use the pilot system at all. Instead, he types prescriptions into another computer and prints them out. “It’s faster,” said Durakiewicz, one of 50 doctors participating in the pilot offered by the state’s Medicaid program and the technology company Shared Health.

Emily Bagley, a product development consultant with Shared Health, said that electronic prescription histories should be immediately available; paper prescriptions take longer to retrieve. Log-offs, she said, result from federal regulations requiring e-prescribing software to log out doctors at regular intervals to prevent unauthorized use of systems. More Here Electronic Prescription