Barriers to e-prescribing remain
January 1, 2012 2 minutes read
Barriers to e-prescribing remain
A study by the US Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that e-prescribing is safe and effective, but still faces many barriers to widespread use. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the study noted the many benefits of electronic prescriptions, including helping to reduce the risk of medication errors caused by illegible or incomplete handwritten prescriptions, and saving money and time by streamlining the process of prescriptions and renewals. The latter is the area on which the study focused.
Physician practices and pharmacies generally felt positive about new prescriptions being transmitted electronically, but the issues of renewals posed problems, and physicians and pharmacies used e-prescribing features for electronic renewals much less often than for new prescriptions.
Among other findings was that pharmacies sometimes need to edit certain prescription information manually, for things such as drug name, dosage, and quantity. One common cause reported by both physicians and pharmacists was that physicians must select medications with more specificity when e-prescribing and make decisions about such factors as packaging and drug form. Such decisions had typically been made by pharmacists for handwritten prescriptions. Pharmacies also noted that they often had to rewrite patient instructions so that the patient could understand them.
The study — "Transmitting and processing electronic prescriptions: Experiences of physician practices and pharmacies" — concludes that a broad group of public and private stakeholders will need to work together to address these issues. Stakeholders include the federal government, e-prescribing standard-setting organizations, vendors and others. It is available at http://jamia.bmj.com/content.
A study by the US Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that e-prescribing is safe and effective, but still faces many barriers to widespread use.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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