The number of physicians using e-prescribing tools to prescribe meds and access a patient's drug benefit info and prescription histories is growing significantly, according to a report by Surescripts, which operates an e-prescribing network.
A few findings: electronic requests for prescription benefit info grew from 79 million in 2008 to 303 million in 2009; prescription histories delivered to prescribers grew from over 16 million in 2008 to 81 million in 2009, and prescriptions routed electronically grew from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million in 2009. Also, the number of prescribers routing scrips electronically reached 156,000 at the end of 2009, up from 74,000 at the end of 2008 – representing about 25 percent of all office-based prescribers(see executive summary).
In discussing the trends, a Surescripts spokesman told The Pink Sheet noted that most of the growth comes from medium and large physician practices that are adopting the e-prescribing, but getting small practices on board remains challenging.
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Timely thread. Last weekend I saw the movie "War Games", where a smart teenager (Matthew Broderick) is able to hack into the Defense Dept. computer, challenging it to play a game called "Global Thermonuclear Warfare". The only problem was that the Defense Dept. computer didn't know it was a game. Anyway, most of you know the rest of the story.
I live in an area where high school kids are smart enough to be able to write programming code for a mainframe computer. I would bet a year's salary that one of them could figure out a way to hack into an e-prescribing algorithm and order any drugs they want, just like Broderick was able to hack into his school's computer and change his grades.
I understand that the pen and pad system may be prone to errors, but that's why God invented the telephone for the pharmacist to be able to call for clarification or verification, if necessar. Nope, I prefer the old ways of doing things.