Working in the emergency department setting I see this a lot. Patients who get discharged from the ED with a prescription and present the prescription to a pharmacy and the pharmacist has to make a call to the ED to clarify the prescription that was written. The impetus for many of these calls are for illegible hand writing on the part of the prescribing provider. Other times the calls are to clarify the details of the prescription because some of the pertinent information has been omitted by the provider when they write the prescription. Some times it is because the patient has tampered with the prescription which is seen with narcotics and the patient is trying to get more medicine than the provider wrote for.
In any event hand written prescriptions come with a myriad of problems. Even computer printed prescriptions which are part of many electronic documentation systems have their problems. People lose the prescription, they get blown out car windows, they get misplaced, and a host of other seemingly inane excuses that patients come up with for why they have lost their prescription. It all creates additional work for providers and pharmacy staff, as well as the patients.
Furthermore, I dare say the costs to either providers or healthcare organizations that use computer generated paper prescriptions is substantial over the long term. These pieces of paper are tamper resistant and are not your ordinary computer paper. In some institutions these full page prescriptions cost $4.00 a sheet. In a busy ED that's a lot of cost for prescribing medications.
So what is the answer, obviously the use of electronic paperless prescribing. Simple to use, it doesn't get lost, you can't tamper with the prescription, and it is legible by pharmacy staff. Other advantages that e-prescribing offers revolve around patient safety. Patients getting the correct medication and dosage, again legibility.
In the latest news about healthcare IT and e-prescribing
Medicare will be offering a small fiscal bonus above provider fees for using e-prescriptions. For those providers that have not made the jump to electronic health records or are dragging their feet about going paperless this new effort is just another carrot to dangle in front of providers to get them to make the change. The writing is on the wall.
Working in the emergency department setting I see this a lot. Patients who get discharged from the ED with a prescription and present the prescription to a pharmacy and the pharmacist has to make a call to the ED to clarify the prescription that was written. The impetus for many of these calls are for illegible hand writing on the part of the prescribing provider. Other times the calls are to clarify the details of the prescription because some of the pertinent information has been omitted by the provider when they write the prescription. Some times it is because the patient has tampered with the prescription which is seen with narcotics and the patient is trying to get more medicine than the provider wrote for.
In any event hand written prescriptions come with a myriad of problems. Even computer printed prescriptions which are part of many electronic documentation systems have their problems. People lose the prescription, they get blown out car windows, they get misplaced, and a host of other seemingly inane excuses that patients come up with for why they have lost their prescription. It all creates additional work for providers and pharmacy staff, as well as the patients.
Furthermore, I dare say the costs to either providers or healthcare organizations that use computer generated paper prescriptions is substantial over the long term. These pieces of paper are tamper resistant and are not your ordinary computer paper. In some institutions these full page prescriptions cost $4.00 a sheet. In a busy ED that's a lot of cost for prescribing medications.
So what is the answer, obviously the use of electronic paperless prescribing. Simple to use, it doesn't get lost, you can't tamper with the prescription, and it is legible by pharmacy staff. Other advantages that e-prescribing offers revolve around patient safety. Patients getting the correct medication and dosage, again legibility.
In the latest news about healthcare IT and e-prescribing Medicare will be offering a small fiscal bonus above provider fees for using e-prescriptions. For those providers that have not made the jump to electronic health records or are dragging their feet about going paperless this new effort is just another carrot to dangle in front of providers to get them to make the change. The writing is on the wall.