Every year since National Health IT Week convened on Capitol Hill in 2005, the importance of healthcare automation to improve provider efficiency and patient outcomes has been gaining momentum. This week’s gathering provides a critical opportunity to fine tune the goals of meaningful use following the recent healthcare IT funding as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).
One important goal is to expand e-prescribing to include automated prescriptions for controlled substances. Here too, momentum has been growing, and the time is right to urge Congress to assure the finalization of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) draft rules to put it in place. Already the states of California, New York and Massachusetts have passed laws granting e-prescribing of controlled substances once DEA rules allow it. A pilot program is also underway within the Massachusetts Department of Health.
During last month’s national web conference on e-prescribing sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), panelists predicted that expansion would improve outcomes through enhanced medication management, and would also decrease drug diversion for illegal purposes. The panel stressed that success means not just increasing up-front financial incentives to adopt e-prescribing, but assuring interoperability with pharmacists based on increasing adoption of electronic health record (EHR) by prescribers in all sizes of practice groups. Similarly, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) predict savings reaching $100,000 if physicians expand e-prescribing in existing EHR systems rather than reprogramming or meeting DEA system requirements from scratch.
Like secure bank transactions occurring daily throughout America, much of the needed automation is already in place at the pharmacy end, where patient ID and payment methods are electronic. For physicians, the e-prescribing of controlled substances would enable automated alerts on contraindications, warnings and recalls already in place in EHR systems, and would add security measures integrated with DEA databases.
The 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine on the role of e-prescribing in reducing medical errors, and an earlier report by HHS finding up to a billion pharmacist call-backs a year, brings us to September 2009, a year to the month that DEA capped the time period for taking comments on its June 2008 draft regulations. In an evidence-based industry like healthcare, it is clearly the right time to finalize regulations allowing for e-prescribing of controlled substances.
Justin Barnes is chair of the national Electronic Health Records Association and vice president of marketing, corporate and governmental affairs at Greenway Medical Technologies. While speaking before Congressional members at the 5th annual National Health IT Week in Washington, D.C. and taking part in a Congressional Policy Summit roundtable, Barnes will be outlining this and other critical healthcare IT goals.
