Benefits of E-Prescribing

Published:

E-prescribing is a powerful tool for clinicians to efficiently and safely manage the medications of their patient. Compared to the traditional paper-based prescribing, e-prescribing enhances medication compliance and safety of patient, which greatly improves efficiency and accuracy in the system. Also, it can reduce health care costs through substitution of less expensive drug alternatives.

Benefits of e-prescribing to both patients and clinicians include:

  1. Decreased risk of medication errors because of elimination from illegibility of handwritten prescriptions. Such medication errors include mistakes by the pharmacist in incorrectly interpreting ambiguous nomenclature or illegible handwriting. Oral miscommunications is also reduced, as e-prescribing reduces the need of telephone calls between the prescriber and dispenser.

  2. The computer ensures that clear and unambiguous instructions are encoded as a structured message to the pharmacist.

  3. Allows increased access to the patient's medical records and their medication history.

  4. Decision support systems can mark lethal combinations of drugs or improper dosages.

  5. Reduces cost and time spent on phone calls and call-backs to pharmacies. This ultimately impacts overall productivity and office workflow efficiency in a positive manner.

  6. Automating prescription renewal request and authorization process: Pharmacy can generate a renewal request (authorization request) to the prescriber's through the electronic network, which can be reviewed and accordingly approved or denied by the prescriber.

  7. Greater prescriber mobility: Gives liberty allowing prescribers to write or renew prescriptions from anywhere, not necessarily from office. This can be achieved by using mobile devices that work on a wireless network, including laptops, PDA's, tablet computers, or mobile phones.

  8. Improving drug surveillance/recall ability: E-prescribing systems has tools to produce queries and reports. It can benefit is quickly finding groups of cases, for example, find similar patients with a particular prescription over a drug, or the types and frequency of medication provided.

  9. Lower cost drug substitutions. Lower cost therapeutic alternatives can be encouraged to help reduce patient costs. This may also help improve patient compliance.

  10. Reduction in time, labor and handling costs, paper expenses, when faxing prescriptions to pharmacies. E-prescription is also more reliable compared to faxing.

For more healthcare, medical and EHR EMR news & articles, visit our articles page.Read More EHR News