Business
Panel concocts e-prescribing recipe
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted June 21, 2004
An expert panel assembled by Rand, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, has issued a report outlining about 60 recommendations for creating electronic prescribing systems suitable to meet the needs of office-based physicians.
Two-thirds of the recommendations were deemed to be achievable within the next three years while the remainder were not, according to "Recommendations for Comparing Electronic Prescribing Systems: Results of an Expert Consensus Process."
The report, which is designed to offer guidance to physicians seeking to buy e-prescribing systems and the software companies that design and sell them, was published last month on the Web site of Health Affairs. The expert panel's recommendations include:
- Import patient identification and demographic data from electronic medical records.
- Provide the patient's current medication list to prescribers who have care responsibility for the patient.
- Display a list of medications appropriate to the diagnosis when it is entered.
- Guard against efforts to promote specific drugs by third parties such as drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers.
- Distinguish alerts based on patient safety and outcomes from those based on formulary adherence.
- Transmit prescriptions using established standards for data exchange.
- Support compliance with HIPAA privacy and security regulations.
The report and a supplement handicapping when each of the 60 recommendations could become commercially available can be accessed online (link).
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2004/06/21/bibf0621.htm.
