Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Electronic prescribing

You can opt for electronic prescribing (or e-prescribing), either in addition to a standard EHR or as a solo act. If you plan to seek the federal incentive payment, e-prescribing is required, so it’s a good first step in getting your staff used to an electronic workflow, and it can help support a number of improved workflows and support medication safety.

E-prescribing allows you to send, confirm, and refill prescriptions safely and quickly to participating pharmacies online. No more faxes, no more maze of phone calls, and no more checking back and forth to confirm drug interaction and dosage issues. Now, after a physician writes a script, it is sent electronically to the pharmacy of the patient’s choice and get on with your life. We talk more about implementation considerations for e-prescribing throughout this book, particularly in Chapter 9.

A number of cost-effective stand-alone solutions exist for e-prescribing. In addition, each U.S. state and territory has received federal funding to promote access to health information technology; e-prescribing is specified on this list as a priority area for states to support. Health plans are getting in on this action, too. For example, Capital BlueCross deployed a stand-alone e-prescribing solution to more than 1,000 practitioners in Pennsylvania. Many e-prescribing solutions can also run on a handheld, mobile, or personal digital assistant (PDA) device, so you don’t need to equip each exam room with a computer ...