e-Prescribing – The Health Care Blog

E-Prescribing: Experiences from Physician Practices and Pharmacies

Sep 1, 2018

By Teresa Zayas-Cabán

The May 2012 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) offers the opportunity for a second look at an important recent study on e-prescribing. The study, “Transmitting and processing electronic prescriptions: experiences of physician practices and pharmacies,” examines practitioners’ experiences with this potentially game-changing technology.

The study, first available on the AMIA web site in November 2011, is now one of 12 articles included in the JAMIA issue on the “Focus on health information technology, electronic health records and their financial impact.” (It is available at no cost at http://jamia.bmj.com/content/current.) In the article, Joy M. Grossman, PhD, and colleagues from the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) conducted a qualitative analysis of 114 telephone interviews with representatives from 97 organizations including 24 physician practices, 48 community pharmacies, and three mail-order pharmacies actively transmitting or receiving e-prescriptions. This study is part of a larger qualitative project on e-prescribing. An earlier publication, released in May 2011, explored physician practice use of e-prescribing to access external information on patient medication histories, formularies and generic alternatives. It can be found at http://www.hschange.org/CONTENT/1202/.

Five Reasons Americans Should Want Electronic Health Records

Oct 2, 2012• 15

By Will Saunders

Although healthcare providers are making progress in adopting health IT, Americans seem to be resistant to change to Electronic Health Records (EHRs). In fact, only 26 percent of Americans want their medical records to be digital, according to findings from the third annual EHR online survey of 2,147 U.S. adults, conducted for Xerox by Harris Interactive in May 2012.

Last month the Institute of Medicine issued a seminal report entitled “Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health in America.” The report estimates the American healthcare system suffered a $750 billion loss in 2009 from inefficient services and administrative expenditures. The report is grounded on the principle that effective, real-time insights for providers and patients which result in collaborative and efficient care depend on the adoption and use of digital records.

As people are naturally resistant to change, education will be key in gaining support among Americans for the transition to EHRs. If providers can help patients understand “what’s in it for me,” that will likely go a long way in making Americans feel more comfortable with the switch to digital.

Let’s take a look at five ways EHRs directly impact the patient. For these examples, we’ll use a fictitious patient named “Joe”:

Health Information Exchanges (HIE): HIEs work on the principle of a network – they grow stronger as more participants join. If Joe’s primary care doctor switches to digital, that’s a great step in the right direction. However, it isn’t truly meaningful until his primary care doctor joins an HIE and begins sharing Joe’s patient health history, medication history, lab results, family and social history and vital statistics with his specialists, emergency care providers, and so on. This sharing of information helps ensure that Joe gets the best quality of care, because all of his providers will be in sync and have the most up-to-date information. It also helps reduce the amount of duplicate exams and labs Joe will be asked to give.

Do Physicians Have a Right to Privacy?

Jun 25, 2010• 20

By MARGALIT GUR-ARIE

As we move to Electronic Health Records (EHR), the debates over security and privacy are becoming more frequent and more poignant. We of course have HIPAA laws on the books and ONC has a Tiger team assembled to recommend privacy and security policies to Secretary Sebelius. CIOs and entire IT departments are all focused on protecting the privacy of patients and their Personal Health Information (PHI). This is, of course, as it should be, but how about privacy of those taking care of patients? Do physicians have a right to privacy too?

As EHRs become more prevalent and interconnected, increasing amounts of clinical and administrative data will be flowing out of doctors’ offices and into the great beyond. Most of this data is indeed patient data, but some of it could be combined, sliced and diced to derive pretty extensive information about doctors. For example, and in no particular order:

Prescribing patterns – Prescription data has been collected and sold to pharmaceutical companies for decades. EHRs will make this much easier to accomplish and the data will become richer and more granular, since it will contain the exact nature of the visit where a particular drug was prescribed or discontinued, including physician notes on the subject. Of course, such information finding its way to public websites would present a novel difficulty if, say, we can look up Dr. X and see that she wrote 30 prescriptions for contraceptives last month, half of which were for girls under 16 years of age.Continue reading…