e-Prescribing A Stepping Stone to Your Future EMR

e-Prescribing A Stepping Stone to Your Future EMR

With today’s focus on increased patient safety, paperless offices, and decreased spending, stand-alone e-prescribing should be considered as a stepping stone to an Electronic Medical Record (EMR). Evaluating EMRs and selecting the RIGHT one for your practice should be done slowly and carefully.  In the meantime, standalone electronic prescribing can be implemented at a fraction of the cost, with a minimal investment of time and disruption to your practice workflow, while reaping the 3 major benefits of an EMR,

E-prescribing’s medication history, allergy and problems list, and evidence-based decision support tools offer physicians access to the most up-to-date and accurate information possible during the prescribing process, allowing providers to take advantage of the key benefits of an EMR at a substantially lower cost.

5 Major Points to Consider

1) Easy to Implement: E-prescribing is an easy-to-implement technology and perfect for a physician’s first step towards becoming acclimated to personally interacting with technology during a clinical process.

2) Smooth Transition to EMR: Establishing how a practice will incorporate technology into their existing workflow is easier with a simpler piece of technology, such as e-prescribing, when getting “buy in” from staff members. Establishing these processes will help ensure a smooth transition into a more complex EMR system in the future.

3) Increased Productivity and Revenue: E-prescribing saves hours of phone time between office staff and pharmacies resulting in greater productivity and increased revenue for a fraction of the price of an EMR system.

4) Patient Safety: E-prescribing is an opportunity to “wow” patients with advanced capabilities while demonstrating a physician’s commitment to the latest patient safety measures.

5) Pre-populate your Future EMR: Using a Surescripts Gold Certified standalone e-prescribing solution that has a migration path to a flexible array of EMRs, allows your practice to quickly and automatically obtain patient demographics and medication history information, as well as begin populating their allergies and problem lists that can eventually be interfaced into your future EMR. For example, DrFirst is a vendor that is integrated with more than 50 EMR companies, and can automatically feed your data to all other EMR systems, providing a smoother migration path of your patient data in the future. Other major standalone vendors such as AllScripts have an upgrade path to their EMR and RxNT allows physicians to interface with some EMRs. You should ask your vendor which EMRs they are partnered with so you can determine what your long-term technology plan for your practice will be.

Lastly, with the recent signing of the e-prescribing bill aimed at promoting nation-wide adoption of e-prescribing, you can also significantly increase your incentive payments from Medicare. The bill has passed both the House and Senate and mandates that all Medicare prescriptions be transmitted electronically by Jan 1, 2011. The bill includes incentives for early adoption as well as small penalties for failure to adopt. The AMA estimates that physicians can receive up to $44,000 over a five-year period for the use of HIT in their practices.

If you want to learn more about e-prescribing, the American Medical Association (AMA) has recently launched a new online learning center to provide physicians with the information and tools they need to make informed decisions about electronic prescribing (ePrescribing). The learning center can be found at www.ama-assn.org/go/eprescribing.  In addition, the AMA has gone through a thorough selection process and will be offering the DrFirst Rcopia e-prescribing solution on their physician portal.

Finally, the Center for Improving Medication Management also has a special resource page that allows prescribers to fill out an online response form to receive instant, customized reports that confirm certification status of technologies used, provide a listing of connected pharmacies in their area, and estimate the value of time they currently spend managing refill/renewal requests by fax and phone. It will also generate a customized action guide for practices seeking to adopt e-prescribing technology and includes a listing of recommended certified e-prescribing systems tailored to meet the individual prescriber’s needs, with the option of contacting the vendors directly to obtain a system demonstration. Check out the website at http://www.getrxconnected.org/