As of this week, doctors and pharmacists nationwide can legally engage in e-prescribing via a specialized network. The development ends a nearly four-year effort by the operators of the Pharmacy Health Information Exchange to remove legal and regulatory barriers to e-prescribing.
When SureScripts, which operates the exchange, began its campaign in 2004, about half the states had laws and rules that prevented doctors and pharmacies from transmitting prescriptions electronically via a network like SureScripts’.
This week, Alaska became the 50th state to make such e-prescribing legal at its 86 pharmacies. The solution was a fairly minor change in Alaska’s rules, said Ken Whittemore, SureScripts’ senior vice president of clinical practice integration. Until now, a rule required that an e-prescription go directly from the doctor to the pharmacy rather than through an intermediary network such as the Pharmacy Health Information Exchange, Whittemore said.
He added that most legal issues in other states centered on rules that prohibited intermediaries from handling prescriptions.
SureScripts announced at a State Alliance for e-Health meeting today that it will collaborate with five other corporations and associations to launch the Center for Improving Medication Management.
The center will explore ways to use information technology to improve how medications are prescribed and used, how prescriptions are filled, and how patient outcomes are evaluated. One area will focus on getting patients to take their medicine. According to recent studies cited by SureScripts, only about half of American patients take their medications as prescribed.
The other organizations supporting the center are the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Humana, Intel, and the Medical Group Management Association.
More than 95 percent of U.S. pharmacies and major vendors of IT systems for doctors are certified as compliant with the SureScripts network, according to SureScripts officials.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
