E-Prescribing

Physicians wrote 1.6 billion prescriptions in 2004 and that accounts for more than five prescriptions for every person alive in the USA.

This accounts for a lot of time-consuming phone calls and faxes between the pharmacies and a doctor’s office.

Based on recent statistics, half of these drug orders require at least one communication between the prescriber and the pharmacy and many times more than one. Questions about restrictive insurance formularies, nonexistent dosage forms, and indecipherable handwriting, among others, all spur conversations for which physicians or their staff has little, if any, time.

The common problems bogging down the system is:
• Telephone tag
• Hide-and-seek charts
• The disappearing act where physicians often leave the exam room to write a prescription which closes a window of opportunity to explain the medication.
• Keeping up with the e-Joneses where small practices cannot afford computerization and E-prescribing. Crack the code of poor handwriting and indecipherable scribbles
• Who’s on first? Patients have an obligation to read all materials doctors or pharmacists hand out regarding a prescribed medicine, and to call in if a drug does not seem to work, makes symptoms worse, or causes unpleasant side effects. Patients also need to arrange for periodic rechecks.

Things that would help everyone are knowing what your patients are taking. There should be a hard-and-fast policy that patients bring their actual medication bottles with them for an exam, or at least a detailed list of all current drugs. Patients see many doctors on average and may have changes made that the primary physician is unaware of.

It is the patient’s responsibility to track their use of the medication and to allow the lead time necessary for a refill authorization. Poor planning on the patient’s part should not create an emergency on the office or pharmacy.

Charging for prescription refills is becoming more common and necessary to offset the huge cost of employee time and paperwork that is now required.

Technology, specifically, e-prescribing is a software application for physicians to send prescriptions straight to a pharmacy. E-prescribing offers a higher quality of patient care, fewer troublesome prescriptions for the pharmacist to process, and peace of mind for you that you’ve done your job to the best of your ability. But not everyone accepts them and not all states play by the same rules making it a hassle at times. It is also an added expense for offices and another software application to manage.

E-prescribing helps eliminate the handwriting worries and minimizes dosing errors. It should save paper as well as phone calls and faxes.

As with all technologies, there are up-sides and down-sides and each has to be weighed appropriately for the offices.