ePrescribe: Still a long ways to go

April 10, 2007

Many have been promoting ePrescribe as a savior for medication errors. The Angry Pharmacist cuts through the hype. I use ePrescribe occasionally, and his concerns are bang on.



Related posts:

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  4. Retail pharmacy survival guide
  5. Transparency cuts both ways
  6. $4 drugs killing local pharmacies?
  7. Vicodin ES #180, 1 tab q4hrs prn pain x 4 refills


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{ 1 comment }

1 Anonymous April 11, 2007 at 7:02 am

Ditto. Try reading the drop down list when prescribing any drug that starts with “Pr . . ” on the 15 inch laptop the clinic put on my desk. I used e-prescribe. The good part was having the med list of the other doctors in front of me. The bad part was that it was cumbersome to take meds off the list so most didn’t take the time. Also dosages were often inaccurate as changing that was cumbersome. In both respects that was like the old med list in the paper chart but not as consistently out of date.

Got a nice readable prescription but didn’t find the much vaunted drug interaction alert to be of any use. Substituted computer entry errors for handwriting errors as the thing to guard against and visits took longer when changing meds. The only thing that was faster was when renewing multiple meds with no change.

Not being born yesterday, when the clinic declared that to force the last holdouts to use it, they were no longer printing paper RX pads, I hoarded boxes of them. They left me working unimpeded whent he inevitable system crashes and printer malfunctions left everyone else in the lurch.

I never fax scripts (or med records). I have gotten too many faxes at my office not meant for me to trust that it will always be sent where I intended.

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