Sun Sep 05 2010
By DARLENE PRINCE
Starting in January, a bonus payment from Medicare may persuade physicians to begin sending their prescriptions to pharmacies by e-mail instead of faxing them or giving hand-written ones to patients.
The positive side of e-prescribing can include a shorter wait for patients, the ability of pharmacists to fill prescriptions when they are not busy with in-store customers and a safer and more accurate way to transmit health information to a pharmacy.
With the federal government looking for ways to save money on Medicare, the bonus payment was conceived as an incentive. The payments will continue until 2012, when doctors still using paper prescriptions will find their Medicare payments being reduced.
The payments are part of a plan to reduce health costs for Medicare by getting rid of paper records. Officials predict that about $30 million a year could be saved by e-prescriptions.
Studies say e-prescribing will improve the safety factor of prescriptions because it will trigger an alert if something is wrong with the prescription or if it interacts with another medicine the patient is taking.
At the Defiance Rite Aid pharmacy, manager Roger McKelvey said, "We do get e-mailed prescriptions, but it is less than 1 percent of our total prescriptions. It is easier for our pharmacists because they do not have to take time to do any data entry with an e-mail, as opposed to fax or a written prescription.
"We have had a couple of doctors from Hicksville who have been sending us e-mailed prescriptions for some time," McKelvey said. "It hasn't caught on yet in Defiance."
At the Kroger Pharmacy, manager Richard Engel said, "Most of our prescriptions from doctors in Defiance are faxed to us. There is one doctor here that e-mails his prescriptions, but he is a doctor that has always been on the cutting edge.
"The prescriptions that are e-mailed to us come from doctors in Fort Wayne and Toledo. E-mailing prescriptions is just getting started here in Defiance, but I heard it will probably increase next year."
He said the state has notified pharmacies to check e-mailed prescriptions carefully, because when the doctor e-mails the prescription on a PDA (personal digital assistant, a hand-held electronic device), the prescription could be wrong if it is not done correctly on the right line.
"E-mailing is suppose to have fewer errors, but even this way, there is still a possibility for human error," he said.
"It is just something we have to watch for."
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