Dear Mr. Blankenhorn:
In my state (Virginia) the way that they have helped decrease the access to narcotic prescriptions is to have a centralized database that is easily accessible by any provider, in "real time," for free to gain access to a patient's purchase of controlled drugs along with the names of physicians that have written the prescriptions. You don't need to go through the e-prescribing process to do this.
Let's go over why e-prescribing will eventually fail to get widespread acceptance:
-- It's a workflow killer- usually involves a cumbersome multi-click method of getting the prescription out to the pharmacy, which may or may not take the prescription and which may not be the pharmacy that your patient decides to buy the prescription at.
-- E-prescribing is not free. Even the supposedly "free" Allscripts standalone e-prescribing software forces the physician to double entry all prescriptions into the EMR that they currently have, which is costly and makes that process useless. Of course, the physician can decide to pay royalties to integrate it into their current EMR (if that's at all possible).
-- The physician will need to purchase a "certified" EHR, which nowadays average approximately $34000.00 per license with $1800.00 per month ongoing fees.
Currently the level of e-prescribed medications stands at about 3% and growing slowly. Unless the software becomes freely accessible, easy to use it will eventually plateau and ignored by physicians.
>>> "?but with the HITECH stimulus and its penalties kicking-in later this decade, those are going to be fewer-and-fewer."
I wouldn't be so sure- the current level of HITECH-ready physicians as per the CDC (published 3 weeks ago) is about 6%, even after the first year of the HITECH stimulus push. Physicians know that "certified" EHR systems are costly, cumbersome, have an approximately 50% disenrollment rate, and have never been proven to actually decrease errors, increase quality, and/or decrease cost as has been stated by President Obama and the various EHR vendorlobbyists that surround him. I've counted 6 lobbyists so far, including GE (Blumenthal), Allscripts (Tullman), and Cerner (DeParle), Partners HealthCare System (John Glaser), eCW (Thomas Frieden, MD), Todd Park (AthenaHealth).
What will become "fewer-and-fewer" are the doctors willing to see Medicare patients due to this increased beaurocracy now with HITECH threats of penalties and the forced "meaningful use" which will turn physicians into secretaries, forcing them to send in data about patients to third party governmental statistician pinheads. President Obama really believes that this HITECH poorly funded mandate will save the increasingly expensive Medicare program. How wrong he is (again). Medicare was scheduled to go bankrupt by 2017- now it'll probably go much, much earlier.
Al Borges MD
Discussion on:
Message 10 of 1
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