By Nancy Ferris
It seemed as if someone had decided to declare last week “e-Prescribing Week” in Washington.
There were rumors that a forthcoming Medicare bill in the Senate Finance Committee would require doctors to use e-prescribing in a tradeoff for getting higher fees for their services.
Then the American Health Information Community (AHIC) recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services seek permission from Congress to mandate e-prescribing in Medicare.
Next the e-Prescribing Controlled Substances Coalition, composed of more than two dozen companies and organizations, wrote to President Bush in hopes of removing a major barrier to widespread e-prescribing.
And the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled a hearing this week on that same barrier – the Drug Enforcement Administration’s rules that prohibit e-prescribing of controlled substances such as narcotics.
Even the American Medical Association is climbing aboard the e-prescribing bandwagon. In an Oct. 31 letter to senators, it said it “is deeply committed to the adoption of e-prescribing into clinical practice” and proposed a series of steps that the government should take, including financial incentives for doctors.
All of this work reflects escalating pressure on the federal government to use its clout to get e-prescribing – and health IT in general -- adopted nationwide.
Even so, AHIC, the broad public-private committee that advises HHS on health IT matters, said not all the necessary groundwork has been laid for a national move to e-prescribing. In a letter to HHS secretary Mike Leavitt, it outlined a series of conditions that should be met in the next year or two before a mandate could take effect.
There was some opposition from representatives of doctors, who said the recommendation was too strong, and from insurers, who called it too weak.
Leavitt, who heads the AHIC, had urged it to recommend the mandate as part of a strategy for gaining adoption of e-health records. E-prescribing often is described as the easiest and most rewarding element of health IT for doctors, hospitals and pharmacies to adopt.
E-prescribing not only transmits prescriptions electronically from a doctor to a pharmacy, eliminating reliance on doctors’ notoriously poor handwriting. It also enables the doctor and pharmacy to check formularies and insurance benefits, warns of allergies and harmful drug interactions and delivers the patient’s medication history, all of which can cut costs and prevent medication errors.