Use of Electronic Prescribing in Healthcare !!

How E-Prescribing Works.

After reading this article, I found it very interesting that how many US physicians have started to use electronic prescribing over past few years. However, a lot of physicians are still using the hand written prescriptions. Prescription drugs are very common treatment in primary health care. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has developed a program that promotes the “meaningful use” of electronic health record systems (EHR). E- prescribing helps prescriber to send electronically, error- free and understandable prescription directly to the pharmacy. There were some following challenges exist in adopting the e-prescribing for primary care that has slowed the adoption of e-prescribing:

·        unrealistic expectations among users

·        inadequate technical support

·        poor functioning of the technical infrastructure for e-prescribing. 

         
Although these challenges do exist, some e-prescribers has still developed their e-prescribing successfully and transformed into their practice extensively. In addition, I also think that the growth of adopting e-prescribing by physicians will increase in next couple of years because there are so many great advantages associated with e-prescribing such as medication safety via automated alerts delivery, less call backs due to poor handwriting, reduce costs via using generic drugs and lower cost medications. Furthermore, it is another way of helping prescribers and patients in order to reduce healthcare cost and therefore, patients adherence may increase due to reduced patients' cost. However, in order to apprehend all these means of e-prescribing, better health information exchange is required for e-prescribing so I believe that improvements can still be made to overcome some of these challenges.

The article can be accessed through the following link:

http://www.annfammed.org/content/9/5/392.full.pdf+htm