Electronic prescriptions give frustration the slip

By IRENE MAHER
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
Published: April 28, 2008

You finally make the appointment to see your doctor, manage to show up on the right day, have your 15 minutes of face time and get the prescriptions that will change your life - maybe even save it.

A few days, maybe weeks, later you finally stop at the drugstore to get them filled. Only now you can’t find them. The little scraps of paper got mixed in with the junk mail or mistaken for trash at the car wash.

That frustration is ending for more and more of us. Physicians increasingly are using electronic prescriptions: They send the prescription via computer from the office to your pharmacy at the time of your appointment. There’s no little slip of paper to lose, no handwriting to decipher, and, theoretically, less delay in getting your medication.

“You just fill in the blanks, hit send and it’s there,” says endocrinologist Anthony Morrison of the University of South Florida.

He’s part of a USF physicians group that has been using electronic prescriptions for about two years. The school was a test site for Allscripts prescribing system.

SureScripts, another physician-to-pharmacy electronic prescription network, plans to launch a nationwide awareness campaign next week in chains including CVS, Walgreens and Wal-Mart alerting customers that electronic prescriptions are accepted.

John Saranko, one of six physicians at the Family Practice Center in Plant City, Fla., has been writing electronic prescriptions for more than a year. Occasionally the system works too well, he says. A patient will arrive at the drugstore to pick up a prescription before the pharmacy has had a chance to check the computer for new orders.

“This is happening less frequently as time goes on,” Saranko says.

Besides the convenience, another big benefit to patients is that they’ll find out before they’ve left the doctor’s office whether the medication ordered is covered by their insurance. If it’s not, doctors can change the prescription right then.

If the patient’s pharmacy doesn’t accept electronic prescriptions, they can be printed out. And that’s still a benefit for everyone, says clinical pharmacologist Dan Buffington. Typewritten prescriptions leave less room for miscommunication or errors sometimes associated with poor handwriting.

Buffington has been called on to give expert testimony in countless lawsuits where handwritten prescriptions were called into question.

Electronic prescriptions reduce medication errors, he says.

“It will make medicine better. It will be more accurate. Period.”