E-Prescribing - A Safety Issue

In today's complicated medical world with the initial decade of the Twenty-First Century almost behind us, generating prescriptions on paper is becoming obsolete. By contrast, electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) has many advantages.

Chief among them is improved patient safety. Medication errors account for an estimated 7,000 deaths each year in the United States. These errors may be triggered by wrong dosing, and missed drug-drug or drug-allergy interactions. But an as yet unknown number of these errors may also be due to so-called "physician's scrawl," otherwise characterized as handwriting illegibility. With an estimated 3 billion prescriptions written annually, the number of unreadable prescriptions may actually surpass 1 billion, or 1/3 the number of prescriptions written. An illegible prescription may cause the wrong dosage of a powerful drug to be administered, or cause a reaction arising from co-mingled substances unnecessarily co-mingled. An illegible prescription may cause the incapacitation or even the untimely death of a loved one - be they parent, son, grandson, granddaughter, cousin, nephew, or friend. Deaths by unreadable prescriptions occur in urban or rural settings, in every state, in every city, in every county in this Diasporas nation. Physician scrawl has been a butt of humor for decades, only the joke is no longer so well taken.

E-prescribing eliminates such illegibility, while decreasing the risk of medication errors and liability risks to physicians and other health care prescribers. When combined with Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and a comprehensive EMR software system, a physician's office is better equipped to provide vastly improved patient care, along with the likelihood of improved outcomes. This is especially true if the e-prescribing feature of an EMR system is incorporated seamlessly into the entire system, so that a physician used to multi-tasking in a busy practice is not tempted to revert to old fashioned methods.

David York is with Fox Meadows, a provider of electronic medical records software, EMR Software, and medical billing software. Learn more by visiting http://www.foxmeadows.com