Online Checklist Can Help You Prescribe The Right Meds

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Using an online checklist that evaluates doses, treatment duration, and changes to antibiotics keeps doctors from choosing unnecessary antibiotics and saves money, too.

A new study has found, by providing a checklist for prescribing physicians that evaluates medications before they give them to patients, doctors saved money and prescribed the most appropriate drugs.

The study, conducted by researchers from the McGill University Health Center in Montreal, was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. It showed that structured time-outs, using a locally developed online checklist, resulted in significantly decreased antibiotic costs coupled with decreased use of targeted medications, according to Health Data Management.

iHealth Beat additionally reports checklist interventions impacted improper or unnecessary prescribing of antibiotics, reducing the amount spent on such drugs by $61,100 in the 18-month study period.

“Our approach tied specific education about antibiotic use with a structural tool to review and guide this use,” senior author Louise Pilote, M.D., said. “This could translate into better prescribing practices. In general, physicians believed the process improved their comfort with antibiotics and provided clinical value.”

Providers are also more likely to prescribe cheaper drugs when the generics are suggested to them first in the EHR. A Pennsylvania study found that this practice lead to a 5.4 percent increase in generic prescriptions.

“Not only was changing the default options within the EHR medication prescriber effective at increasing generic medication prescribing, this simple intervention was cost-free and required no additional effort on the part of the physician,” said the study’s leader. “The lessons from this study can be applied to other clinical decision efforts to reduce unnecessary health care spending and improve value for patients.”