Paper checks out of hospital, ePrescription takes its place

Seems as though paper has found its way into another battle -- the National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative wants to replace our old tree-based friend with a presumably much safer Web-based system. Rather than continually risking the lives of millions of people by making pharmacists decipher doctors' illegible handwriting, prescriptions will are entered into a website, hopefully leaving less room for harmful and fatal errors. It's amazing that only "one fifth of U.S. doctors" use this kind of electronic system; by now you would think the robots that have invaded hospitals would be the ones doling out the happy pills, but we guess that's a battle left for another day. On the plus side, hackers will now have endless access to the uppers they need for monitoring their botnets around the clock.

[Miguel @ Jan 18th 2007 4:13AM]

Yeah, this is absolutely brilliant: let's put all this patient and drug data onto an accessible server. Alternatively, we could (like my doctor) enter the prescription into the computer, have it printed off, clearly legible, and then have the doctor sign it. If you want it to go direct to your pharmacy so that you don't lose it, simply ask the doctor's office to fax it over. How eminently practical.

[fraz @ Jan 18th 2007 2:23PM]

Miguel: What's more important: nearly eliminating the ~88,000 per year prescription errors/possibly fatal drug interactions (and thereby saving ~1000's of lives per year), or retaining our current prescription system for the sake of your own privacy fears? Hmmmmm.... that's a tough one.

[Maria @ Jan 18th 2007 9:21AM]

I work at a pharmacy, and I think electronic prescriptions are the best things since sliced bread.
-Illegible scripts make us a lot more inefficient. Sometimes there are three or four of us trying to figure out what drug or strength a doctor has written. Half the time, we wind up having to call the doctor, who may or may not remember what he wrote.
- patients can no longer scratch non-painkillers off their prescription and claim the doctor did it.
- doctors sometimes write strengths of a medication that dont exist, or write some combination of two different strengths (like ER and then 200 for a drug that comes in 200 and ER 400).
- patients have a tendency to do horrible things to their prescriptions... lose them, smear them, run them through the wash.
- a huge number of prescriptions we receive don't have adequate info like DEA numbers... so we have to call.
- To anyone that doesn't realize this already, in most major pharmacies, we dont work with the paper prescription. We scan it, then store it and work completely with the electronic image. And people make mistakes too, during typing and whatnot.
- People still get painkillers, etc. now. Some people are pretty good at forging doctors signatures, right down to the dea number.

I could go on, but the point is that an electronic system is really no less unsafe than the antiquated paper one we use now.

[Greg @ Jan 18th 2007 10:22AM]

The Air Force has been using this for years for our drugs. I guess it works for us since we just walk down the hallway to get to the drug store from the docs office.

[fraz @ Jan 18th 2007 2:30PM]

Miguel: What's more important: nearly eliminating the ~88,000 per year prescription errors/possibly fatal drug interactions (and thereby saving ~1000's of lives peryear), or retaining our current prescription system for the sake of your own privacy fears? Hmmmmm.... that's a tough one.

[Saleem @ Oct 16th 2008 12:55PM]

hi, I am the student of Computer Science. I plan to develop a project i.e Electronic Prescription for doctors and phamacies. this software had not been develop in my country Pakistan so far that why i have less real time information about such systems. and there is no concept of deployment of such applications in Pakistan. please send me the informations and basic objectivies that this kind of software meet!
Advance Thanks!
Saleem