Adoption Of E Prescribing At The Va

to enable access to prescription information by practitioners, law enforcement agents, and other authorized individuals and agencies

Implementation of EHR shows improvement of quality of care by the nurses ability to access the patient chart at the bedside, decreasing the risk of wrong patient errors.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are an important component in health care reform, but do they really bring efficiency to the practice? The extent to which practices use EHRs vary from the very basic (entering clinical notes and viewing results) to the intermediate (using e-Prescribing to indicate adverse drug prevention and provide suggestions for alternative drugs) to the advanced use (including lab and radiology order entry with testing guidance, capture of electronic charge, and evidence-based guidelines).

E prescribing can be a part of the EHR in Epic, which would include patient data, and not just prescription information. When e prescriptions are utilized in Epic, the medication is checked for interactions with the patient’s other medications and allergies. Check systems within Epic look for drug-allergy, drug-drug, and how the medication reacts with the disease. In a case study of 17 physicians in an ambulatory clinic conducted by Abramson et al., error rates from prescribing decreased from 35.7 per 100 prescriptions to 12.2 per 100 prescriptions in a year of e-prescribing as reviewed in this study. The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 stated that healthcare providers would have access to EHRs to ensure the meaningful use standards per the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS). Meaningful use is attained by increasing the quality of patient outcomes by having access to the medication data, the patient’s history, and diagnosis by the prescriber. Prescribing is safer, when the provider is aware of the patient’s history, current medications, and allergies, therefore better patient outcomes. In the United States, the HITECH Act and the meaningful use standards stated by CMS have increased the use of e-prescribing per Friedman (2009). The CMS made e prescribing a

There are so many ways e-prescribing is beneficial to physicians, I am going to discuss my top 5 reasons.

Meaningful use is defined as using certified electronic health record (EHR) technology. It is important to healthcare because of the following; quality, safety and efficiency which reduces health disparities by having computerized physician order entry (CPOE) to document all medical orders that other health care providers inside and outside the hospital to be aware of health management. Maintaining an active medication lists ensuring that any health care provider working with a patient is aware of most or all the medications that a patient is being treated with, and allows the EHR system to make the health care provider aware of any controlled medications, allergies, or drug-drug interactions. Implementation of clinical decision support rules

The use and advancement of technology has expanded throughout the years. Technology has recently begun to be incorporated into the healthcare setting to enhance patient care, patient safety, and to optimize therapeutic outcomes. This concept is otherwise known as medical informatics, and is composed of six core areas: electronic health records (EHR), computerized provider order entry (CPOE), electronic prescribing, pharmacy automation and dispensing systems, privacy and security of informatics, and telehealth. Computerized provider order entry specifically refers to a licensed healthcare professional inputting medication orders and other medical information into an electronic pharmaceutical program.1 However, implementing CPOE has revealed

Many if not all healthcare systems are transferring paper-based record systems to electronic systems (Rezaeibagha, F., Win, T K., Susilo, W., 2015). Electronic health record systems or EHR are providing a better quality of services to patients in health care settings. In US, there is an estimation of 1.5 million patients harmed due too medication errors, yearly, with an estimation of 400,000 adverse events that could have been prevented (Agrawal, A. 2009). IT system based electronic health records are being implemented to improve access to information, while organizing the information, and linking it together for perfect patient outcomes. Often times

E-Prescribing is an incentive by the Centre for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). It allows the electronic transmission of prescriptions between qualified medical practitioners and physicians. The aim of the program is to improve the drug prescription system by avoiding errors resulting from handwritten prescriptions. The E-prescribing program runs on various standards. These standards are spelt out and added in Part D of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act 2003 (CMS, 2013).

There are several challenges involved in successfully implementing the meaningful use of EHRs. Among the most significant barriers are the high expense involved in upgrading current EHRs to meaningful use compliant EHRs, the computer literacy of medical staff, interoperability and the effective exchange of data for coordinating care between different facilities, and patient privacy and security of their medical information. An additional significant hurdle is the computerized physician order entry (CPOE) criteria. A study conducted by the Journal of the American Medicals Informatics Association found that half of the hospitals that failed to achieve meaningful use cited the primary reason as failing to effectively implement

Through EPCS both controlled and non-controlled substances that have been paid for by that patients insurance will show up. E-prescribing systems and pharmacy systems flag potentially deadly prescription errors and drug interactions related to opioid use, this can prevent accidental deaths and overdose use. Also, refill request monitoring is used to help flag abuse and diversion. Physicians will have to prescribe controlled substances electronically if they are to meet the federal government’s proposed higher e-prescribing threshold of

Many of the EHR error studies discussed were mixed method studies. The focus of these studies varied from identifying patient safety risks to measuring the advantages and disadvantages of the EHR. A level of interest is increased over time as the use of electronic health records continue to develop. EHRs are allowing for patients to become actively engaged in their healthcare as a new way of learning is presented to patients through personalized medicine.

The number of lost prescriptions is reduced, because with e-Prescribing, the prescription is sent directly to the pharmacy instead of there being a chance that the patient loses it.

There are 7 levels that are currently attempting to define the minimum functions an EHR should perform to help physicians practice better medicine and improve the bottom line. They are the following, Identify and maintain a patient record, Manage patient demographics, Manage problem lists, Manage medication lists, Manage patient history, Manage clinical documents and notes, Capture external clinical documents, Present care plans, guidelines, and protocols, Manage guidelines, protocols and patient-specific care plans, Generate and record patient-specific instructions. On the other hand we have the E-prescribe that is better then faxing. For example, E-prescribing allows a physician to write a prescription that is electronically transmitted to

Another big plus of the EHRs is that studies have shown that it has helped providers improve accuracy of diagnoses and health outcomes (Couch, 2008). For example, nurses could have reliable access to patients complete health information and have pictures which would help with whatever problem they might encounter. EHR doesn’t just keep patients medications and allergies, it also check for problems whenever a new medication is prescribed and it also alerts the nurse of potential problems (Couch, 2008). EHRs can also tell the nurse if potential safety problems occur, which helps them avoid more serious consequences for patients, which can lead to better outcomes. The EHRs can also help nurses quickly identify and correct operational problems, which compared to the paper-based setting, those kinds of problems would be more difficult to correct. It can also help