E-Prescribing: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

By Shahid N. Shah, The Healthcare IT Guy

The Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) promotes e-prescribing (eRx) as "a prescriber's ability to electronically send an accurate, errorfree and understandable prescription directly to a pharmacy from the point-of-care." The primary reason CMS wants us to e-prescribe is that it is supposed to reduce medication errors, thereby enhancing patient safety. On Jan. 1, 2009, well before the Meaningful Use incentive program was even conceived, the e-prescribing incentive program was implemented to help promote eRx, and many physicians began prescribing electronically. eRx is in general, of course, quite old, but the real pickup in users has come since 2009. So, what have we learned in the past couple of years after the incentive program started?