Electronic prescribing, also known as ePrescribing, is fully changing today’s way of delivering healthcare around the globe. It also plays a remarkable role in increasing the protection of the prescribing process and its effects. Clinicians will automatically refill hundreds of thousands of RXs at the same time with ePrescription systems, allowing more time in the hands of the clinicians to check them. This will reduce the rate of a prescription error, improve productivity, and decrease the rates of no show appointments for that specific healthcare facility. 

Tackling the blunders

A major cause of blunders by health practitioners is misreading manual prescriptions. In most cases, this occurs because of illegible handwriting that leads to different forms of errors, including incorrect drug frequency or length, incorrect dosage, and incorrect patient details. Moreover, when precious time is lost to pharmacists or health practitioners unable to understand what is written in a prescription, any workflow is less effective. E-prescriptions are particularly uncomplicated and transparent in terms of dose and care as compared with manual prescriptions. On the part of the pharmacist, they often need much less understanding.

Supporting Healthcare providers for better care

E-prescribing provides complete access to health care professionals into any of the recorded allergies and previously administered medications of a patient and can cause clinical warnings if there is the possibility for harmful reactions in a newly prescribed medication. Device warnings will warn the prescriber of allergies, reactions with the patient’s other medications, duplicate treatment, as well as pediatric, maternity, and geriatric complications that may prevent a certain drug from being taken by a patient.

Helps in medical adherence

When a physician offers a handwritten prescription to a patient, there is no reliable way to check whether the prescription has been filled. Patients sometimes fail to fill prescriptions, can not afford the drug, lose the piece of paper, or start feeling better and decide not to take the drug. E-prescribing enables doctors to check if patients are filling their prescriptions and, if they have not, advise patients on drug management. Physicians also gain insight into the frequency at which prescriptions for controlled drugs are filled by patients, making it easier to detect possible drug abuse.

Improved Pharma Workflow

As the patient does not need to be present for the prescription to be filled, e-prescribing has also been shown to streamline prescription delivery and decrease wait times at local pharmacies. This is a service that can be useful for injured staff, patients who are immunocompromised, and older people. Moreover, the time it takes to enter the medication manually into the computer system is decreased. Improved protection, reduced waiting times, and improved pharmacy consultation services are expected to result in greater patient satisfaction with the pharmacy’s services, eventually contributing to customer retention and increased sales.

If your facility is trying to adopt an EHR that sends e-prescriptions (which is a prerequisite to reach practical usage goals) or it is switching systems and requires different e-prescribing capabilities, you can see great results in no time until you have settled on an ePrescription model that will fit best to suit your organization’s needs.