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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic prescribing | 2/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_prescribing | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:28:22.279053+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Improving patient safety and quality of care === Illegibility from handwritten prescriptions is eliminated, decreasing the risk of medication errors while simultaneously decreasing risks related to liability. Oral miscommunications regarding prescriptions can be reduced, as e-prescribing should decrease the need for phone calls between prescribers and dispensers. Causes of medication errors include mistakes by the pharmacist incorrectly interpreting illegible handwriting or ambiguous nomenclature, and lapses in the prescriber's knowledge of desired dosage of a drug or undesired interactions between multiple drugs. Electronic prescribing has the potential to eliminate most of these types of errors. Warning and alert systems are provided at the point of care. E-prescribing systems can enhance an overall medication management process through clinical decision support systems that can perform checks against the patient's current medications for drug-drug interactions, drug-allergy interactions, diagnoses, body weight, age, drug appropriateness, and correct dosing. Based on these algorithms, the system can alert prescribers to contradictions, adverse reactions, and duplicate therapies. The computer can also ensure that clear and unambiguous instructions are encoded in a structured message to the pharmacist, and decision support systems can flag lethal dosages and lethal combinations of drugs. E-prescribing allows for increased access to the patient's medical records and their medication history. Having access to this information from all health care providers at the time of prescribing can support alerts related to drug inappropriateness, in combination with other medications or with specific medical issues at hand. Electronic prescribing has been shown to reduce prescribing errors by up to 30%.
=== Saving clinicians time === According to estimates, almost 30 percent of prescriptions require pharmacy callbacks. This translates into less time available to the pharmacist for other important functions, such as educating consumers about their medications. In response, E-prescribing can significantly reduce the volume of pharmacy call-backs related to illegibility, mistaken prescription choices, formulary and pharmacy benefits, decreasing the amount of time wasted on the phone. This ultimately impacts office workflow efficiency and overall productivity in a positive manner. Both prescribers and pharmacists can save time and resources spent on faxing prescriptions through a reduction in labor costs, handling costs, and paper expenses waste due to unreliability. With e-prescribing, renewal authorization can be an automated process that provides efficiencies for both the prescriber and pharmacist. Pharmacy staff can generate a renewal request (authorization request) that is delivered through the electronic network to the prescriber's system. The prescriber can then review the request and act accordingly by approving or denying the request through updating the system. With limited resource utilization and just a few clicks on behalf of the prescriber, they can complete a medication renewal task while enhancing continuous patient documentation.
=== Increasing patient convenience and medication compliance === It is estimated that 20% of paper-based prescription orders go unfilled by the patient, partly due to the hassle of dropping off a paper prescription and waiting for it to be filled. By elimination or reducing this waiting period, e-prescribing may help reduce the number of unfilled prescriptions and hence, increasing medication adherence. Allowing the renewal of medications through this electronic system also helps improve the efficiency of this process, reducing obstacles that may result in less patient compliance. Availability of information on when patient's prescriptions are filled can also help clinicians assess patient adherence.
=== Allowing greater prescriber mobility === Improved prescriber convenience can be achieved when using mobile devices, that work on a wireless network, to write and renew prescriptions. Such mobile devices may include laptops, PDAs, tablet computers, or mobile phones. This freedom of mobility allows prescribers to write/renew prescriptions anywhere, even when not in the office.
=== Improving drug surveillance/recall ability === E-prescribing systems enable embedded, automated analytic tools to produce queries and reports, which would be close to impossible with a paper-based system. Common examples of such reporting would be: finding all patients with a particular prescription during a drug recall, or the frequency and types of medication provided by certain health care providers.
== Limitations == Although e-prescribing has the ability to streamline workflow process and increase the system's efficiency, challenges and limitations that may hinder the widespread adoption of e-prescribing practices include: