E-prescribing: One giant leap toward pharmacy practice integration
Mark offers a very well developed piece on how legislation attempts to help, what types of barriers we need to overcome, and the importance of interoperability.
In the past 10 years, one of my favorite words has become "interoperability". It explains so much of what we strive to create in the healthcare technology sector, yet remains one of our biggest challenges. One of the major design flaws with federal regulations regarding ePrescribing was the naivety of pharmacy practice. Appropriate workflows and order processing steps in the pharmacy setting were not reviewed in the pilot study, nor were they addressed in the rule with gusto until the comment periods opened to the pharmacy community. This leaves the pharmacy profession with questions and concerns about how to implement, utilize, and encourage our vendors to support ePrescribing. A great example of this is ePrescribing for controlled substances. We have a federal rule, but no vendors on the market can support the requirements to date. My experience in technology tells me you don't typically want to create policies without really knowing what developers are capable of building. Policy development is based on knowledge of practice and process. This of course includes how pharmacies are using electronic prescribing technology, what they are using it to do, and where they need improvement in workflow.
Please do not mis-interpret my widespread support for the electronic prescribing initiative. I understand and recognize its importance in creating a unified electronic health record. However, we have to be very careful not to segment information even further by allowing data to run rampant and un-checked by professionals. Often times humans are still accustomed to putting garbage into computer systems just to get to the next step. With drug formulary checks, cross checking drug duplicates, and reviewing medication profiles it can get out of hand quickly.
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