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There are 2 ways to use e prescribing, with an EMR and directly.

Directly is very slow and requires time, perhaps it is being done more by staff, but time is still money. Staff are less likely to react to error messages that pop up, lessening the value of e prescribing.

Directly through an EMR is the problems. The programs do not interface with AC well. Is it AC's fault or the vendors? Doesn't matter in our case because it is what we use.

If it interfaced smoothly, then it is an issue of cost. Suuure the feds say you will get a Medicare bonus (I'm in peds, that's nothing) and maybe there will be medicaid bonus (they barely pay us now, I won't hold my breath.)

So that leaves the issue of quality. Are we all so blind that we will miss that many allergies or drug interactions? There is a lot of hype about this but no data.

Yes, e prescribing COULD be better, but it is not set up currently to either be functional or practical for the majority of physicians.

I will ignore those EMRs that have integrated functional e prescribing AND work well, since the cost is absurd and contributes to the overall inflation of the health care budget thus not in the interest of the American public.

One word of caution, I believe Surescripts has changed their corporate approach and are moving towards a revenue model that charges folks for access to any of the information in their databases. So, since they have somewhat of a monopoly on all the RX data for large populations, they want to charge 'per click' when a physician, pharmacy, etc access the dbase.

Anyone know any more about this?

sky

I don't know any more than what you just said, however it comes as no suprise. I will venture to bet that every last one of these companies will do this. Suck us in and then rape us financially, like everyone (EXCEPT DR JON BERTMAN) has done to physicians for years.

They know about the Medicare 2% deal. They want to capitolize upon it. If our 2% incentive becomes a 1% incentive or a 0.5% incentive once we figure in the added overhead charges, WHY BOTHER????

For my small practice, it's not worth a 2% incentive.

We pay per click right now but that cost is not given to you. There is a transaction fee that DrFirst pays to surescripts. You the doctor's do not see those fee's that is why we have an annual fee, which believe me is very reasonable!