I’m in the ePrescribing track with a couple of smart people telling us the ePrescribing will happen. Danny Sands of Zixcorp (and of Harvard) thinks that in the last year it’s really picking up in Mass with 3,000 doctors on board. So he’s an optimist. He especially believes that ePrescribing will be a decent intermediate step for those practices who realistically are not getting to an EMR any time soon.

Tony Scheuth, who I knew when he was hanging out at an original CHIN company called IMS in Colorado, is now a consultant who spends 80% of his time in ePrescribing. He thinks that pay for performance is maybe enough to push it over the top. But at the moment the incentives aren’t big enough (although he’s going to say that the dollars may be big enough in California & Mass). And then he went through the list of the P4P groups and how their incentives are often linked to infrastructure (or more accurately system use).

Of course the whole issue is that there is no financial advantage to the docs unless they’re at risk for the drugs, which 98% of docs are not.

So two optimists.  Perhaps they should both know better!  Or just maybe they might be right?