The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has issued final standards for e-prescribing under the Part D Medicare drug program.
Doctors, drug stores and other providers are not required to use e-prescribing, but when they do so for Medicare patients covered under Part D, they must comply with the new standards for four types of information:
• Formulary and benefits queries let prescribers and pharmacists know what drugs are covered under the patient’s plan and whether less expensive generics are available.
• Medication history information lets doctors, pharmacists and health plans know what medicines a patient may be taking. This is designed to prevent adverse drug reactions that occur when a doctor does not know what other doctors may have prescribed for the patient.
• Fill status notification informs doctors about when a patient picks up a prescription or fails to do so.
• Provider identification requires providers, pharmacies and health plans to use the national provider identifier, reducing queries about what doctor prescribed the medication.
The new standards will become mandatory April 1, 2009.
“The Part D e-prescribing standards final rule moves us closer to achieving interoperable health information technology, one of the cornerstones of the Administration’s Value-Driven Health Care Initiative,” Acting CMS Administrator Kerry Weems said in a statement. “Converting from a paper-based system to e-prescribing promises improvements that will help prescribers, pharmacies, and all who are eligible for Medicare’s prescription drug benefit. Most importantly, e-prescribing can help reduce the number of adverse drug events, which have been estimated at 530,000 a year for Medicare beneficiaries.”
An earlier set of “foundation” e-prescribing standards took effect with the start of Part D on Jan. 1, 2006. Those standards covered the exchange of information on such matters as eligibility inquiries and responses; new prescriptions; and changes, renewals and cancellations of prescriptions.
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.
