The Congressional Budget Office has determined that requiring doctors who treat Medicare patients to use electronic prescribing could save the nation $3 billion a year, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said today.
As a result, prospects for passage of Kerry’s e-prescribing bill are good, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said. Both were speaking at an e-prescribing event in Washington.
Because of the CBO finding, Gingrich said, lawmakers are likely to attach the e-prescribing bill to some other measure destined for passage this year. “This was a very big breakthrough,” Gingrich said, because CBO rarely determines that health IT bills will reduce the government’s health care costs.
But Gingrich, now a consultant who founded the Center for Health Transformation, did not predict smooth sailing for the measure, which has been introduced in the House and the Senate.
“The next big resistance will come from doctors who are sole practitioners or in very small practices, who don’t want a mandate," Gingrich said. He characterized their positions thus: “I reserve the right to issue paper prescriptions and kill people.”
Both Gingrich and Kerry argued that the bill would save lives as well as dollars and the time wasted by doctors and pharmacy staffs straightening out indecipherable or erroneous handwritten prescriptions.
“Let’s see if we can actually pass a no-brainer in Washington, D.C.,” Kerry said.
The bill, the Medicare Electronic Medication and Safety Protection (E-MEDS) Act, would require that Medicare prescriptions be written and transmitted electronically by 2011. Introduced with bipartisan sponsors, it would give physicians extra Medicare payments for complying and would reduce their payments if they fail to comply.
The administration has proposed a similar measure. Dr. Robert Kolodner, the national coordinator of health IT, said e-prescribing has immediate benefits for both doctors and their patients, and the administration regards it as an important first step along the way to e-medical records.
They spoke at an event honoring the states with the highest rates of e-prescribing. Once again, Massachusetts was No. 1 in 2007, followed by Rhode Island.
At the event, five physician organizations announced the launch of a new Web portal, www.GetRxConnected.com, where doctors can get information about e-prescribing. Many doctors who generate prescriptions electronically will then fax them to pharmacies, when they could transmit them into the pharmacy’s computer system. The new Web site is intended to help doctors make full use of the software many already have.
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.
