E-Prescribing: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Hoping to reduce medication errors and contain health care costs, policy makers are promoting electronic prescribing through Medicare and Medicaid financial incentives….
While most of the 24 practices studied reported that physicians had access to patient formulary information, only slightly more than half reported physician access to patient medication histories, and many physicians did not routinely review these sources of information when making prescribing decisions. Study respondents highlighted two barriers to use: 1) tools to view and import the data into patient records were cumbersome to use in some systems; and 2) the data were not always perceived as useful enough to warrant the additional time to access and review them, particularly during time-pressed patient visits.
Full white paper on how e-prescribing affects physicians’ prescribing decisions.
Drug information systems can be very useful if they are fully utilized. However, proponents of these systems assume doctors will have the time to fully learn and use the features. This may not be the case when physicians are very busy and do not get paid extra for the effort.
I think that the problem we’re observing is that the uptake of e-prescribing is driven by government’s demand, not patients’. If the physicians and patients don’t think that e-prescribing will help, they will not buy into it, even though they’ll go through the motions because the government will pay for it.
Sadly, the current approach is likely to harm effective adoption of e-prescribing, rather than facilitate it. Also, because the government is driving it, we are seeing lobbying by interested parties to pass laws determining what the e-prescribing software can and cannot do (see http://tinyurl.com/3pbvsaq.)
Better safe than sorry … I keep a list of my medications with me and make sure the PCP doctor has his file up to date on every visit, especially important if a specialist has added something new. I have found the pharmacist to be more dependable with checking out my meds than the doctor.