@ Burt: No offense.
I know all the rationales advanced for using electronic prescribing, and I use it -- mostly.
I prescribe lots of controlled substances -- I have a lot of elderly patients with intractable pain, cancer, as well as kids (and adults) with ADHD. For all of the reasons that you obviously know, I want to see people regularly if they are using those drugs. It's too easy for them to go astray.
I buy tamper resistant paper in 8x11 sheets that are scored into quarters and feed them into a standard laser printer
I set up the printer driver so it prints the prescriptions one-quarter size, and so I send people home with normal-sized prescriptions instead of notebook pages. I don't have a STAR printer.
Repetitive prescriptions come out of the prescription writing software (like those situations where you can write for 3 months at a time) -- just use the old one and change the date.
I could certainly figure out how to use EPCS, but I will quit before complying with another "mandate" to use anything. Besides, I don't see why we have to pay to write prescriptions
