Prescription Management Software

Summary of e-prescribing Challenges

Prescription management software seems like the in vogue thing to do these days. It’s part of the proposed meaningful use matrix and so no doubt we’re going to hear a lot more about it (and we should). However, e-prescribing software isn’t without its challenges. The following are a couple of the responses that I received from people about their experience with prescription management software.

Doctor’s advocate that I am, I’ll start off with a doctor’s experience…

Prescription management software e-Rx has been one of the best additions to our EHR. We have reduced paper use significantly, and rarely have problems with transmission. The problems mainly relate to the extra work of entering which pharmacy the patient wants to use.

Oftentimes patients decide to change from what they had requested previously and then you have to search the database for the correct pharmacy. Living in a large city can be cumbersome. Our clinical coordinator has entered cross streets into the database to make this easier.

Our state does not permit transmission of controlled substances which in a pediatric practice is primarily psychostimulant medications. Another minor issue is that you have to have the correct units before it will transmit – e.g. if you want 30 of a capsule you have to put 30 caps in the amount field even though you ordered capsules in the medication field. This is not the way most docs are accustomed to writing prescriptions but certainly more accurate.

If there are pharmacies that do not use prescription management software it goes by fax which can be very slow. Some pharmacies are better than others about keeping up with their -rxs coming in and it won’t be ready when the patient arrives. We tell the patient to call the pharmacy when leaving the office to let them know they are coming.

Overall, e-rx has been a very positive experience – saving time, paper and money. Our prescription management software with DrFirst integrates fully into the EHR making the documentation seamless.

From someone who used to work for an e-prescribing company…

  1. There was a saying “Free is not cheap enough” i.e. even if you give away the service, many, if not most doctors are not interested in it, because of the time and effort to implement e-prescribing (HW, networks, training etc). The MIPPA incentives definitely helped, but many doctors still felt that they were insubstantial compared to the cost (mostly their time) that they would have to invest in this.
  2. You still cannot prescribe Schedule drugs (primarily narcotics) via e-prescribing. This made it a tough sell to several specialties (pain, ortho, etc.).

    I agree with you that e-prescribing is an area where there is almost universal agreement that this is a service that is much better than the traditional paper and pen method. All the doctors I have spoken to agree on this. Over time, prescription management software will become more and more popular, especially as EHRs penetrate the market. The last data I saw from Surescripts indicated that over 100,000 providers were now using prescription management software, which is significantly higher than even just last year.

Visit to read more: http://www.emrandhipaa.com/category/eprescribing/
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