E-prescribing on the Increase

On March 16, 2009, the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association released a study by Visante suggesting that the newly adopted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would increase the number of physicians using e-prescribing.  The bill gives financial incentives to physicians for adopting new health technology.  E-prescribing is a medical technology that allows physicians to enter prescription information into an electronic system and send it directly to a pharmacy.  Medicare also recently created an incentive for physicians to use e-prescribing, paying physicians up to two percent more when they use it.

In the next five years, the percentage of physicians e-prescribing is projected to increase from 13% to 75%.  One of the greatest benefits of e-prescribing is significant error reduction.  According to a report issued by the Institute of Medicine in 1999, up to 98,000 people die every year due to medical error.  There are several types of common prescription mistakes that could be eliminated or substantially reduced by using electronic equipment to proscribe medicine.  These errors range from name confusion to sloppy handwriting.

As fewer mistakes are made in patient’s medical care, costs will be reduced in the health care system overall.  Not only will patients likely have lower, on average, hospital stays but e-prescribing has the potential to make the entire medical system more efficient.  This system could be expanded to make a patient’s health information more accessible within the hospital to the patient’s care team. 

Cost reduction also flows directly to the patient, as e-prescribing offers physicians easier access to comprehensive information about generic drugs.  In a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, physicians who switched from writing prescriptions by hand to e-prescribing prescribed 3.3 more generic prescriptions.  This increase becomes even more significant when coupled with the fact that physicians who use e-prescribing currently only use it on 20 percent of their total prescriptions.

Errors can also be reduced by instituting other types of technology in hospitals such as putting barcodes on medications and scanning them before administering the treatment to the patient.  A study of two hospitals in Virginia using a system of barcodes (scanning the barcode on the nurse’s ID strip, the patient’s ID strip, and the medication before administering the drug) reduced medical errors by 70%.

While the predicted significant increase in e-prescribing is an admirable move toward better and more efficient patient care, why has the traditional handwritten prescription slip lasted so long? Why is the health care industry so far behind other industries in the implementation of technological advances in some areas while it leads in others such as revolutionary treatments and cures for diseases?