Online Prescribing

aka E Prescribing

if everyone thinks that Prescription Drugs errors are a biggest or most-preventable category of Medical Error, then starting out by pushing that narrow behavior change might make a lot of sense

What kind of errors actually happen? Who makes them? Do they actual "get to" the patient, or does someone else catch them and correct them? Do they get through but not have significant effect, or maybe get caught before having significant effect? http://www.mederrors.com/feature/feature4.html

Do the significant errors happen in the hospital or outpatient?

If you were building an ASP service that would feed into online ordering systems of various pharmacy chains, what data/functions would you need?

• patient identification, Health Insurance/ID, allergies (other medical info?)

• physician practice info (multiple physicians at same practice)

• standard drug identification

  • does someone have systematized interaction data sets, or just big text documents? Drug Database.

• pharmacy location info: where to direct the rx to

• enter multiple prescriptions simultaneously for same patient

  • track history (and make it easy to re-prescribe)

• insurance plan formularies?

What are the biggest pharmacy chains in the US? Which ones support online prescribing?

What's the benefit to the doctor? Who else benefits? Can they pass along benefit/penalty to the doctor?