Professional habits die hard
Nobody takes easily to change, especially professionals working long and grueling hours like doctors, treating patients and saving lives. But this is a change that should help them do that. At least that’s how Time sees it.
Doctors’ sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It’s a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.
To address the problem—and give the push for electronic medical records a shove—a coalition of health care companies and technology firms will launch a program Tuesday to enable all doctors in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. The National e-prescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) will offer doctors access to eRx Now, a Web-based tool that physicians can use to write prescriptions electronically, check for potentially harmful drug interactions and ensure that pharmacies provide appropriate medications and dosages.
That’s key, because usually your personal pharmacist is more on top of all the medications you’re taking than any one physician, and drug interaction a huge issue. But outside the pharmacists’ profession, who talks about it? Technology is finally catching up to these problems.
Although some doctors have been prescribing electronically for years, many still use pen and paper. This is the first national effort to make a Web-based tool free for all doctors. Tullman says that even though 90% of the country’s approximately 550,000 doctors have access to the Internet, fewer than 10% of them have invested the time and money required to begin using electronic medical records or e-prescriptions.
I don’t know about the money, but some just don’t have the time to learn new gadgets, I’ve discovered. So making this a sweeping changeover, providing the tools and the help sessions to bring doctors up to speed on these devices promises a big payoff, especially for the patients.
Wider adoption of e-prescribing could lead to further efficiency in medical record keeping, which many believe is vital to both improving health care delivery and lowering costs. “Electronic prescribing could be an on-ramp for physicians beginning to use a full-featured electronic medical records system,” Hutchinson says. “That’s the holy grail.”
However, I wonder what will happen when they hit the inevitable glitch we get all too often “Sorry, the computers are down. Please try again later.”