By Neil Versel
Just as predicted at the end of 2008, e-prescribing volume nearly tripled in 2009, according to prescription transaction network Surescripts. And the growth has picked up this year.
Surescripts reports that U.S. prescribers wrote 191 million electronic prescriptions in 2009, up from 68 million a year earlier. That accounts for about 12 percent of all 1.63 billion original prescriptions–not refills–of all scripts written last year. For the first three months of 2010, nearly 20 percent of all new scripts have been filed electronically.
To date, about one-quarter of office-based physicians nationwide have e-prescribing technology, even if they aren’t all using it, Surescripts adds, about twice the rate at the end of 2008.
The rapid growth could further accelerate as the Drug Enforcement Administration moves to lift a restriction on e-prescribing of controlled substances. Last month’s DEA interim final rule “is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Dr. John Halamka tells the Wall Street Journal. “Now we can write prescriptions for Lipitor and Valium on the same program,” adds Halamka, CIO of Boston’s CareGroup Healthcare System and an emergency physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
For more information:
- read this Wall Street Journal story, which includes a discussion of the safety benefits of e-prescribing
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/erx-growth-accelerates-dea-ruling-spur-adoption/
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Ten Keys To A Successful CPOE Implementation
One of the keys to achieving meaningful use and thus being able to qualify for federal incentive payments for the implementation of EMRs is the use of Computerized Physician Order Entry. What exactly is CPOE and how can it be implemented successfully?
CPOE is a program that physicians use to place orders for medications, lab tests, radiology exams, admissions, referrals and other tasks. A CPOE replaces written orders, phone calls and faxes, because it is linked to every other department in the hospital.
The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), a unit of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded ten grants to various health care providers to implement CPOE, and studied what happened. Their results show that there are certain things that providers can do to help improve the chances of a successful implementation.
The ten contracts were spread across both urban and rural hospitals in various parts of the country, and were intended for use in implementing inpatient programs. Some CPOE systems were implemented with EMRs, or in addition to existing EMRs, and all of them were put in place in conjunction with a decision support system.
Interviews with the grant recipients revealed that certain factors were critical to the success of a CPOE implementation. Here is a brief summary:
* Training – Frequent training and retraining is critical to a successful implementation.
* Staffing – Staff who understand both IT and clinical science are important. If you don’t have them, hire them or train existing personnel.
* Workflow – CPOE is by nature disruptive, so plan to redesign your workflow to accommodate these changes.
* Resources – Be sure to allocate enough resources (money, time and people) for planning, training, implementation and maintenance.
* Work With Vendors – Have good relations with vendors, but don’t allow them to delay your implementation program. Write penalties into contracts.
* Committees – Create and use Clinical Steering Committees early and often.
* Order Sets – Involve as many clinicians as possible in the creation of order sets, but strike a balance between filled-in fields and default values.
* Interoperability – Good luck with this one. Most of the grantees faced challenges integrating CPOE with other programs. Vendors did not want to cooperate in connecting to other company’s products.
* Support – Support should be available 24/7, especially at the beginning of the implementation. Address problems quickly and completely. Make support easy to access.
* Alert Fatigue – Expect a lot of alerts when you go live, and expect clinicians to find it annoying. Grantees had to develop new techniques to eliminate unnecessary alerts.
The conclusions reached here show that implementing the CPOE component of an EMR will pose challenges that will require creativity and tenacity while you design workarounds, but a successful implementation is possible. It seems to be true that what works for CPOE will work for other components of an EMR implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/ten-keys-successful-cpoe-implementation/
CPOE is a program that physicians use to place orders for medications, lab tests, radiology exams, admissions, referrals and other tasks. A CPOE replaces written orders, phone calls and faxes, because it is linked to every other department in the hospital.
The Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), a unit of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded ten grants to various health care providers to implement CPOE, and studied what happened. Their results show that there are certain things that providers can do to help improve the chances of a successful implementation.
The ten contracts were spread across both urban and rural hospitals in various parts of the country, and were intended for use in implementing inpatient programs. Some CPOE systems were implemented with EMRs, or in addition to existing EMRs, and all of them were put in place in conjunction with a decision support system.
Interviews with the grant recipients revealed that certain factors were critical to the success of a CPOE implementation. Here is a brief summary:
* Training – Frequent training and retraining is critical to a successful implementation.
* Staffing – Staff who understand both IT and clinical science are important. If you don’t have them, hire them or train existing personnel.
* Workflow – CPOE is by nature disruptive, so plan to redesign your workflow to accommodate these changes.
* Resources – Be sure to allocate enough resources (money, time and people) for planning, training, implementation and maintenance.
* Work With Vendors – Have good relations with vendors, but don’t allow them to delay your implementation program. Write penalties into contracts.
* Committees – Create and use Clinical Steering Committees early and often.
* Order Sets – Involve as many clinicians as possible in the creation of order sets, but strike a balance between filled-in fields and default values.
* Interoperability – Good luck with this one. Most of the grantees faced challenges integrating CPOE with other programs. Vendors did not want to cooperate in connecting to other company’s products.
* Support – Support should be available 24/7, especially at the beginning of the implementation. Address problems quickly and completely. Make support easy to access.
* Alert Fatigue – Expect a lot of alerts when you go live, and expect clinicians to find it annoying. Grantees had to develop new techniques to eliminate unnecessary alerts.
The conclusions reached here show that implementing the CPOE component of an EMR will pose challenges that will require creativity and tenacity while you design workarounds, but a successful implementation is possible. It seems to be true that what works for CPOE will work for other components of an EMR implementation.
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/ten-keys-successful-cpoe-implementation/
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
NIST Begins Rolling Out EHR Performance Testing Program
By Rich Silverman
There are hundreds and hundreds of Electronic Health Record software packages in the marketplace that claim to be capable of allowing you to establish meaningful use, but how do you know if those claims are true? So far there has not been an impartial, independent way to determine the truthfulness of a vendor’s claims.
Earlier this month, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) rolled out the first part of its testing infrastructure, created in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vendors, implementers, standards organizations and certification bodies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) designated NIST as the agency responsible for determining if EHRs meet HHS standards for functionality, interoperability and technical benchmarks.
According to Bettijoyce Lide, NIST’s senior advisor, program coordinator for Health IT, speaking to Information Week Magazine, the goal is to establish a health IT infrastructure that provides a high level of security to American’s electronic medical records. “New test methods, along with testing infrastructure, certification, security and usability help ensure that the health information of Americans is exchanged safely, securely, reliably, and only to appropriate sources,” she said.
NIST created the test procedures and infrastructure based on the Interim Final Requirements (IFR) published by HHS on January 13th of this year. If those requirements change, NIST says it will change its test procedures accordingly. Plans call for tests to be rolled out in four waves.
Fifteen test drafts have been rolled out so far, each keyed to a specific requirement as spelled out in the IFR. As an example, test criteria 170.302(b) relates to maintaining an up-to-date problem list, a key meaningful use requirement. The test will determine if the program will “enable a user to electronically record, modify, and retrieve a patient’s problem list for longitudinal care in accordance with (1),the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(A), or, (2) at a minimum, the version of the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(B).”
Other tests will evaluate a product’s ability to maintain allergy and medication lists, calculate body mass index (BMI) and track among history. Additional tests will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
To keep stakeholders informed about the full extent of NIST’s activities in the health care certification arena, NIST has set up a special website with links to all of its major activities: infrastructure creation, test methods, conformance testing, and testing and support. The overall program can be used by vendors to determine if their products will meet standards before it submits them for certification, and will be used by approved certification bodies to test those product offerings.
This NIST program puts into place one of the final pieces of the certification puzzle. It will enable you to determine if a product which claims to be certified will actually perform the functions it says it can perform, because it has been tested and proven to meet the standards set forth by the HITECH Act and the definition of meaningful use.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/nist-begins-rolling-out-ehr-performance-testing-program/
There are hundreds and hundreds of Electronic Health Record software packages in the marketplace that claim to be capable of allowing you to establish meaningful use, but how do you know if those claims are true? So far there has not been an impartial, independent way to determine the truthfulness of a vendor’s claims.
Earlier this month, the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) rolled out the first part of its testing infrastructure, created in conjunction with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), vendors, implementers, standards organizations and certification bodies. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) designated NIST as the agency responsible for determining if EHRs meet HHS standards for functionality, interoperability and technical benchmarks.
According to Bettijoyce Lide, NIST’s senior advisor, program coordinator for Health IT, speaking to Information Week Magazine, the goal is to establish a health IT infrastructure that provides a high level of security to American’s electronic medical records. “New test methods, along with testing infrastructure, certification, security and usability help ensure that the health information of Americans is exchanged safely, securely, reliably, and only to appropriate sources,” she said.
NIST created the test procedures and infrastructure based on the Interim Final Requirements (IFR) published by HHS on January 13th of this year. If those requirements change, NIST says it will change its test procedures accordingly. Plans call for tests to be rolled out in four waves.
Fifteen test drafts have been rolled out so far, each keyed to a specific requirement as spelled out in the IFR. As an example, test criteria 170.302(b) relates to maintaining an up-to-date problem list, a key meaningful use requirement. The test will determine if the program will “enable a user to electronically record, modify, and retrieve a patient’s problem list for longitudinal care in accordance with (1),the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(A), or, (2) at a minimum, the version of the standard specified in §170.205(a)(2)(i)(B).”
Other tests will evaluate a product’s ability to maintain allergy and medication lists, calculate body mass index (BMI) and track among history. Additional tests will be rolled out over the coming weeks.
To keep stakeholders informed about the full extent of NIST’s activities in the health care certification arena, NIST has set up a special website with links to all of its major activities: infrastructure creation, test methods, conformance testing, and testing and support. The overall program can be used by vendors to determine if their products will meet standards before it submits them for certification, and will be used by approved certification bodies to test those product offerings.
This NIST program puts into place one of the final pieces of the certification puzzle. It will enable you to determine if a product which claims to be certified will actually perform the functions it says it can perform, because it has been tested and proven to meet the standards set forth by the HITECH Act and the definition of meaningful use.
Above article publish on http://www.ehrexperts.us/nist-begins-rolling-out-ehr-performance-testing-program/
Health Affairs: About 80% of EMR users meet some meaningful use criteria
Filed Under (EHR, EMR, Electronic Medical Records) by admin
Between 75-85 percent of physicians with EHRs are already using functions that meet some of the proposed criteria for demonstrating meaningful use, according to analysis from Seth O. Hogan, survey director, and Stephanie M. Kissam, health services research associate, at RTI International in Chicago.
The authors of the survey, published in the April edition of Health Affairs, said their analysis contributes new information about the rates at which primary care physicians, medical specialists and surgical specialists who had a basic EHR system used specific functions before the passage of the stimulus law, compared to the level of expected meaningful use of EHRs set forth in the proposed federal regulations.
“Among physicians who had key functions available to them, 75-85 percent reported using functions in the patient record category. These functions included organizing patient information such as sex and date of birth, lists of medications taken by the patient, problem lists or the current diagnoses of patients and clinical notes,” wrote the authors.
A stratified random sample of 5,000 U.S. office-based physicians was drawn from the American Medical Association’s Physicians Masterfile where, after 516 were determined as ineligible, 2,758 of the 4,484 eligible physicians completed the surveys during a data collection period from August 2007 to February 2008, yielding a 62 percent response rate.
The authors sorted completed interviews by whether physicians reported having a basic EHR system, meaning that it offers practitioners, at minimum, the following functions: the ability to record patient demographics, including name, address and sex, inclusion of patient problem lists, clinical notes, patient medication lists, and orders for prescriptions and electronic viewing of laboratory and imaging results. “Applying these criteria resulted in a sample of 485 physicians eligible for analysis,” the authors noted.
Fewer than one in five physicians reported having at least a basic EHR system, the survey found. Of those who did, primary care physicians were the most likely to report having a basic EHR system (19.4 percent). Medical specialists were the next group most likely to have a basic EHR system (17.1 percent) followed by surgeons (16.7 percent). “Availability of additional EHR functions, beyond those defined in a basic system, varied across all physician groups,” the authors wrote.
The use of these basic functions did not differ significantly by broad medical specialty yet the authors reported these data to provide baselines for tracking changes by specialty groups over time.
According to the survey, 79 percent of 306 responding physicians whose EHR systems had warnings for drug-to-drug interactions used this function. For information exchange functions, the authors also reported on the use of sending prescriptions electronically (79 percent of 265 respondents whose records had this function) and submitting laboratory orders electronically (used by 64 percent of 256 respondents whose records had this function).
“Public health reporting functions were less commonly used among the small number of physicians who had those functions available to them,” the authors wrote. In addition, only 27.6 percent of the 128 responding physicians said they could provide at least 10 percent of unique patients with timely electronic access to their health information, the authors found.
“To qualify for new federal funds intended to promote the widespread adoption and use of EHRs, U.S. physician practices must meet the government’s meaningful use benchmarks,” concluded the authors. “Tracking the use of EHRs across different types of providers will be a critical component in evaluating how their use affects healthcare costs, quality and safety and overall population health measures.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/health-affairs-80-emr-users-meet-meaningful-criteria/
Between 75-85 percent of physicians with EHRs are already using functions that meet some of the proposed criteria for demonstrating meaningful use, according to analysis from Seth O. Hogan, survey director, and Stephanie M. Kissam, health services research associate, at RTI International in Chicago.
The authors of the survey, published in the April edition of Health Affairs, said their analysis contributes new information about the rates at which primary care physicians, medical specialists and surgical specialists who had a basic EHR system used specific functions before the passage of the stimulus law, compared to the level of expected meaningful use of EHRs set forth in the proposed federal regulations.
“Among physicians who had key functions available to them, 75-85 percent reported using functions in the patient record category. These functions included organizing patient information such as sex and date of birth, lists of medications taken by the patient, problem lists or the current diagnoses of patients and clinical notes,” wrote the authors.
A stratified random sample of 5,000 U.S. office-based physicians was drawn from the American Medical Association’s Physicians Masterfile where, after 516 were determined as ineligible, 2,758 of the 4,484 eligible physicians completed the surveys during a data collection period from August 2007 to February 2008, yielding a 62 percent response rate.
The authors sorted completed interviews by whether physicians reported having a basic EHR system, meaning that it offers practitioners, at minimum, the following functions: the ability to record patient demographics, including name, address and sex, inclusion of patient problem lists, clinical notes, patient medication lists, and orders for prescriptions and electronic viewing of laboratory and imaging results. “Applying these criteria resulted in a sample of 485 physicians eligible for analysis,” the authors noted.
Fewer than one in five physicians reported having at least a basic EHR system, the survey found. Of those who did, primary care physicians were the most likely to report having a basic EHR system (19.4 percent). Medical specialists were the next group most likely to have a basic EHR system (17.1 percent) followed by surgeons (16.7 percent). “Availability of additional EHR functions, beyond those defined in a basic system, varied across all physician groups,” the authors wrote.
The use of these basic functions did not differ significantly by broad medical specialty yet the authors reported these data to provide baselines for tracking changes by specialty groups over time.
According to the survey, 79 percent of 306 responding physicians whose EHR systems had warnings for drug-to-drug interactions used this function. For information exchange functions, the authors also reported on the use of sending prescriptions electronically (79 percent of 265 respondents whose records had this function) and submitting laboratory orders electronically (used by 64 percent of 256 respondents whose records had this function).
“Public health reporting functions were less commonly used among the small number of physicians who had those functions available to them,” the authors wrote. In addition, only 27.6 percent of the 128 responding physicians said they could provide at least 10 percent of unique patients with timely electronic access to their health information, the authors found.
“To qualify for new federal funds intended to promote the widespread adoption and use of EHRs, U.S. physician practices must meet the government’s meaningful use benchmarks,” concluded the authors. “Tracking the use of EHRs across different types of providers will be a critical component in evaluating how their use affects healthcare costs, quality and safety and overall population health measures.”
Above article publish on http://www.emrspecialists.com/2010/04/health-affairs-80-emr-users-meet-meaningful-criteria/
Providers will attest to meaningful use via CMS registration system
By Neil Versel
If nothing else, it should at least be easy to register to receive federal incentive payments for meaningful use of EMRs.
CMS has awarded a $1.6 million contract to CGI Federal, a Fairfax, Va.-based unit of Montreal-based technology consulting firm CGI Group, to revise the existing Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) so physicians and hospitals can attest to meeting the requirements for meaningful use that will qualify them for Medicare bonuses. PECOS currently manages and verifies enrollment of Medicare providers and vendors.
Build-out of the online system to accommodate EMR incentive enrollment should take about 10 months, CMS says. Hospitals, however, could be eligible for the bonuses as soon as the end of December, since the rules for meaningful use, as currently proposed, only requires providers to meet the standards for 90 consecutive days in 2011. Medicare Part A, which applies to inpatient care, follows the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.
For more information:
- see this Government Health IT story
- read this CMS notice about the contract award
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/providers-attest-meaningful-cms-registration-system/
If nothing else, it should at least be easy to register to receive federal incentive payments for meaningful use of EMRs.
CMS has awarded a $1.6 million contract to CGI Federal, a Fairfax, Va.-based unit of Montreal-based technology consulting firm CGI Group, to revise the existing Provider Enrollment Chain Ownership System (PECOS) so physicians and hospitals can attest to meeting the requirements for meaningful use that will qualify them for Medicare bonuses. PECOS currently manages and verifies enrollment of Medicare providers and vendors.
Build-out of the online system to accommodate EMR incentive enrollment should take about 10 months, CMS says. Hospitals, however, could be eligible for the bonuses as soon as the end of December, since the rules for meaningful use, as currently proposed, only requires providers to meet the standards for 90 consecutive days in 2011. Medicare Part A, which applies to inpatient care, follows the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct.1.
For more information:
- see this Government Health IT story
- read this CMS notice about the contract award
Above article publish on http://www.myemrstimulus.com/providers-attest-meaningful-cms-registration-system/
Friday, April 23, 2010
Using A Medical Billing Software Can Increase Your Revenues Overnight
By Gen Wright
Health facilities are busy places and one error in the request-handling queue can be disastrous for the day’s business. This is when everything goes haywire and nothing quite works out. Clients are screaming about the mismanagement and the staff is trying desperately to fix things and find the missing report. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to database intensive businesses like medical centers time and again. If it hasn’t happened to you, you are still running a risk of this impending disaster happening right in front of you. Taking such avoidable risks are not a good idea. You should upgrade to a good medical billing software and streamline your operations. It makes a lot of business sense to do this. First, you can take care of those screaming patients by eliminating the chances of all such problems happening. You can control the entire process from a central server and everything can be automated. So when a query is sent, the data is retrieved from your central computer and everything goes smoothly. There is no waiting to see if a slot is empty. Cancellations are handled automatically and the person next in line is upgraded to get the appointment. You have no loss of time, money or resources and most importantly, patients are kept happy and satisfied. They keep on coming back to you and your business grows. After installing the medical billing software, you can finally digitize a lot of your data and you can finally get rid of those mountains of paperwork regularly. Not only will it save your tangible operational costs, it will also make your establishment eco-friendly by giving you a smaller carbon footprint. This can easily be another point for marketing your health care facility and it might earn you some good reviews as well. The medical billing software works efficiently and at a very high-speed. So you can speed up the entire operations process, giving your staff and yourself a much needed relief. And still, you will be able to handle more queries per day than ever before. Here is another opportunity to make your business grow. It will allow you to grant your patients a world-class medical service that they deserve and still be able to keep your margins high and thus make the entire establishment more profitable. With medical billing software in place, you can also aim at a strategic downsizing of your establishment. This is because the new-age medical billing software needs fewer operators than your older system. Thus, you can save more costs that way and it will add to your overall revenue. The medical billing software supports full customization and branding of your receipts and slips. You can use the same template as you were using before without any problem whatsoever. You thus get to keep your branding intact and still be able to upgrade to a much more advanced system. So if you own a health care and/or medical facility, what are you waiting for? This is the missing key to your exponential growth and success. Get medical billing software today!
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-software-increase-revenues-overnight/
Health facilities are busy places and one error in the request-handling queue can be disastrous for the day’s business. This is when everything goes haywire and nothing quite works out. Clients are screaming about the mismanagement and the staff is trying desperately to fix things and find the missing report. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to database intensive businesses like medical centers time and again. If it hasn’t happened to you, you are still running a risk of this impending disaster happening right in front of you. Taking such avoidable risks are not a good idea. You should upgrade to a good medical billing software and streamline your operations. It makes a lot of business sense to do this. First, you can take care of those screaming patients by eliminating the chances of all such problems happening. You can control the entire process from a central server and everything can be automated. So when a query is sent, the data is retrieved from your central computer and everything goes smoothly. There is no waiting to see if a slot is empty. Cancellations are handled automatically and the person next in line is upgraded to get the appointment. You have no loss of time, money or resources and most importantly, patients are kept happy and satisfied. They keep on coming back to you and your business grows. After installing the medical billing software, you can finally digitize a lot of your data and you can finally get rid of those mountains of paperwork regularly. Not only will it save your tangible operational costs, it will also make your establishment eco-friendly by giving you a smaller carbon footprint. This can easily be another point for marketing your health care facility and it might earn you some good reviews as well. The medical billing software works efficiently and at a very high-speed. So you can speed up the entire operations process, giving your staff and yourself a much needed relief. And still, you will be able to handle more queries per day than ever before. Here is another opportunity to make your business grow. It will allow you to grant your patients a world-class medical service that they deserve and still be able to keep your margins high and thus make the entire establishment more profitable. With medical billing software in place, you can also aim at a strategic downsizing of your establishment. This is because the new-age medical billing software needs fewer operators than your older system. Thus, you can save more costs that way and it will add to your overall revenue. The medical billing software supports full customization and branding of your receipts and slips. You can use the same template as you were using before without any problem whatsoever. You thus get to keep your branding intact and still be able to upgrade to a much more advanced system. So if you own a health care and/or medical facility, what are you waiting for? This is the missing key to your exponential growth and success. Get medical billing software today!
Above article publish on http://www.mymedicalbillingoutsourcing.com/medical-billing-software-increase-revenues-overnight/
E-Prescribing Expected To Rise in Wake of DEA Rule, CMS Incentives
Health care industry experts expect recent policy changes to spur more physicians to start prescribing medications electronically in the coming years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Trends in E-Prescribing
A recent report from the electronic prescribing network Surescripts found that the number of prescriptions submitted electronically increased from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million in 2009. According to Surescripts, about 25% of all office-based physicians have the technology necessary to e-prescribe.
Policy Changes
Last year, CMS started providing physicians with incentive payments for e-prescribing. Starting in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing physicians that have not adopted e-prescribing systems.
Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s new final rule easing restrictions on e-prescribing for controlled substances is expected to contribute to an uptick in e-prescriptions. The rule allows physicians to e-prescribe for most medications, rather than maintain a separate paper process for controlled substances.
Concerns
Some health care providers and experts have cautioned that e-prescribing does involve certain risks.
For example, some physicians have reported prescription errors that resulted from pressing the wrong computer key when filling out drug and dosage information (Martin, Wall Street Journal, 4/20).
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/eprescribing-expected-rise-wake-dea-rule-cms-incentives/
Trends in E-Prescribing
A recent report from the electronic prescribing network Surescripts found that the number of prescriptions submitted electronically increased from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million in 2009. According to Surescripts, about 25% of all office-based physicians have the technology necessary to e-prescribe.
Policy Changes
Last year, CMS started providing physicians with incentive payments for e-prescribing. Starting in 2012, CMS will begin penalizing physicians that have not adopted e-prescribing systems.
Meanwhile, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s new final rule easing restrictions on e-prescribing for controlled substances is expected to contribute to an uptick in e-prescriptions. The rule allows physicians to e-prescribe for most medications, rather than maintain a separate paper process for controlled substances.
Concerns
Some health care providers and experts have cautioned that e-prescribing does involve certain risks.
For example, some physicians have reported prescription errors that resulted from pressing the wrong computer key when filling out drug and dosage information (Martin, Wall Street Journal, 4/20).
Above article publish on http://www.eprescriptionservices.com/eprescribing-expected-rise-wake-dea-rule-cms-incentives/
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