Healthy Edge
Patient Safety: Get your doctors on the same page!
At a recent e-prescribing training event, not a single physician attending had a dry eye after learning about the presenter's wife. Despite her well-documented severe allergy to morphine, it was repeatedly administered to her by multiple health care professionals at a highly-reputable hospital, contributing to her tragic death.
According to the Institute of Medicine, you'll experience one medication error per day on average if you're a hospital patient.
Medication errors -- "any preventable event that may cause or lead to inappropriate medication use or patient harm while the medication is in the control of the health care professional, patient, or consumer" (National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention) -- occur in every other health care setting as well, whether it's physician practices, emergency rooms, long-term care facilities, or pharmacies.
One flick of a pen or a poor communication could result in you or a loved one taking excessive amounts of a drug or even one that's unnecessary and dangerous.For instance, one of the recent medical error reports on the Food and Drug Administration Web site indicated that a Senior with rheumatoid arthritis died after receiving an overdose of methotrexate-10-milligrams daily instead of 10-milligrams weekly. Daily dosing of methotrexate is a common treatment for those with certain cancers, and low weekly dosing is sometimes used for patients with arthritis, asthma or inflammatory bowel disease.
Our chances of suffering from a medical error increase as we age and need hospitalizations and medications.
Yet, many of these errors that happen in health care settings -- and many of the 1.5 million preventable injuries they cause each year -- can be avoided with low-cost technologies.
Maybe it's time to ask your health care professionals if they're e-prescribing. Get them on the same page!
Why are there so many medication errors?
The best doctors and pharmacists in the world practice in America. Yet, they're operating in a fragmented, complex health care system with a bombardment of pharmaceuticals. Meaning: your doctors are probably prescribing meds, with limited information about drug-to-drug interactions, knowledge about all of the medications and supplements you may take, and your drug allergies and reactions.
Even worse, they're prescribing in limited time. Plus, you may see multiple providers and pharmacists depending on your unique medical needs.
What's e-prescribing?
Although the name "e-prescribing" sounds like it's simply sending an e-mail of your prescription, it's much more than that.
Providers use e-prescribing to recommend drugs much like we use calculators to help with math.
Certified e-prescribing technologies do the following:
* help providers pick the right medication for you
* take your medication history and drug allergies into account
* dramatically reduce your chances of having a bad drug reaction
* reveal the drug's cost and lists alternative drugs, allowing you to price shop
* determine if your insurance covers the suggested drug (a.k.a. formulary decision support).
All of this occurs across a secure network that only your docs and pharmacists can access.
What are the benefits of e-prescribing?
Among other benefits, e-prescribing increases patient safety by:
* eliminating illegible prescriptions
* providing doctors and pharmacists critical drug safety alerts, your drug-allergies and your medication history... immediately
* updating your medication history for all of your e-prescribing doctors.
There are other important patient-friendly, e-prescribing benefits.
For one, prescriptions arrive at the pharmacy while you're still in sitting the exam room. According to the Health Care Information and Management Systems Society, 20 percent of prescriptions aren't filled because patients don't take them to the pharmacy.
Also, your doctor can tell you if your insurance covers the suggested medication. They can also tell you the medication's cost and offer less expensive alternatives that may be just as effective. How's that for service?
E-prescribing is such a good idea that the federal government is offering doctors e-prescribing incentives. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the agency overseeing Medicare) are currently paying providers a bonus to start e-prescribing. For 2009 and 2010, providers who are e-prescribing get a 2 percent bump in Medicare payments.
Doctors that don't e-prescribe by 2012 should expect penalties. After that date, paper-philic doctors will be dinged 1 percent of their 2012 and 2013 Medicare charges and 2 percent of their 2014 Medicare bills.
How do I find out if my doctor is e-prescribing?
Visit www.learnabouteprescriptions.com to find a list of doctors currently e-prescribing by state and city.
What if my doctor just doesn't want to start?
It happens.
On average, three patients must ask their doctor to change a process before he or she even researches the patients' recommendations, Dean of the University of South Florida College of Medicine Dr. Steven Klasko said.
Dr. Klasko sees getting Florida's doctors to adopt e-prescribing as a military-like effort -- one that will not succeed without patient activism.
Bottom-line: be persistent and make sure your friends are courteously asking their providers to start e-prescribing as well.
Need more information?
You and your providers can learn more at ePrescribe Florida (www.eprescribeflorida.com), Executive Director is Walt Culbertson: 904-230-1336. Or, call Kendra Siler-Marsiglio at WellFlorida Council (www.wellflorida.org): 352-313-6500 ext. 109. §
Kendra Siler-Marsiglio, Ph.D. is the director of the Rural Health Partnership at WellFlorida Council, a state-certified, non-profit organization.
