The importance of good prescribing habits cannot be overemphasized as they are essential to ensuring the shortest duration of patient’s illness, effective and safe treatment, less distress and injury to the patient, and lower health care costs.
One of the major cons cited by critics of physician dispensing is that the practice poses serious medication safety concerns. This is because most medication errors occur during the prescribing process. Most of these prescription errors that occur due to a doctor’s pharmacological knowledge or lack thereof are often detected and rectified by the pharmacists. But when a physician prescribes and dispenses, this layer of consumer protection is eliminated.
However, this is where e-prescribing, as well as the experienced professionals at BRP Pharmaceuticals, come in.
Let’s talk about e-prescribing and its benefits first, and then we can subsequently inform you of the benefits that BRP Pharmaceuticals offers your practice and patients alike.
So what is ePrescribing?
E-prescribing is the computer-based transmission and filling of a patient’s prescription. This procedure is fast replacing the place of faxed and paper prescriptions.
It is often joked that pharmacists are necessary to decipher the doctor’s “terrible” handwriting but with e-prescribing, however, prescribers are now able to electronically transfer patients’ prescription information into pharmacy computers – and even better when it is an in-office pharmacy. This process has efficiently reduced prescribing and medication errors and by extension has resulted in fewer pharmacy call-backs to physicians for clarification.
Sending and receiving prescriptions electronically has streamlined the workflow in clinical practice while also increasing patient compliance and satisfaction. Furthermore, connecting the pharmacy and physician’s systems reduces paperwork and the mistakes that often occur from relying on the handwritten prescriptions.
With all these benefits of e-prescribing, one would think that many practices and pharmacists would embrace this procedure as a means to improve their patient experience but many have remained hesitant about adopting an e-prescribing system.
Hence, the need to explore, in this blog post, the benefits that e-prescribing offers physician dispensing such as: improve the accuracy, efficacy, and cost of prescribing in physician dispensing
Benefits of e-prescribing to dispensing physicians
Patient Safety: The e-prescribing process improves patient safety by increasing prescription legibility thus decreasing medication errors and cutting down on the time spent prescribing medications and dispensing them to patients. Research has shown that medication prescription error rates decreased from 42.5% to 6.6% in just one year of introducing e-prescribing to 12 community-based practices.
Efficiency of E-prescribing
E-prescribing also enhances the efficiency of the entire prescribing process. Although entering a new prescription usually takes an average 20 seconds longer per patient than when the same prescription is written, this time is offset by the time that the in-office pharmacy saves as a result of not having to contact the dispensing physician for clarifications.
Increase in Patient Cost Savings and Medication Adherence
E-prescribing coupled with in-office dispensing makes the entire process of patient recovery easier and more cost-effective. This, in turn, increases patient adherence to medication therapy. A 2008 to 2010 study found a 10% increase in filled prescriptions when e-prescribed in comparison to written prescriptions.