Throw Out That Prescription Pad

How often does anyone put pen to paper these days? We don’t write down phone numbers; we key them into our contact lists. When the kid’s grades are slipping, we send the teacher an email. Invitations have turned into “e-vites.” Even love notes arrive via text message.

And yet most doctors are still writing prescriptions by hand.

Although it offers all the usual benefits of information technology—decreased waste, better record keeping, increased efficiency—and although the software has been available for years, e-prescribing is not the norm. Not even close. “Only about 36 percent of all prescriptions were delivered electronically in the United States in 2011,” according to an upcoming report highlighted in the New York Times.

Study after study shows that e-prescribing drastically reduces prescription errors. MVP has participated in several of these studies in the Hudson Valley area; you can read the results in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety.

Or you can simply read my highly scientific summary: old system, bad; new system, good. Partly that’s because e-prescribing eliminates handwriting legibility issues that we all joke about. But e-prescription programs also provide prompts and safeguards, alerting doctors to contraindications, correct dosages, and so on. Fewer prescription errors mean fewer “adverse drug events,” which means fewer patients harmed in small ways and large.

Sure, e-prescribing saves paper. But the real reason doctors and hospitals should hurry up and switch is that it saves lives.