Editor's Corner

More encouraging news about ePrescribing this morning as the Henry Ford Health System (and its subsidiary Health Alliance Plan) is trumpeting its successful implementation of a system backed by PBM giant Medco and the big auto makers. As expected, ePrescribing reduces medical errors and increases the use of generics (and hence lowers drug costs for payers). That's why ePrescribing is getting a big push from payers. It also saves time in the pharmacy since it's easier and more efficient to process a script electronically than for the pharmacist to try to read the doctor's scribble and type it in manually. To that end, the big PBMs have set up a network (RxHub) which implants formulary information into ePrescribing applications, and the pharmacies have set up another (Surescripts) which will accept electronic scripts. The only problem is getting doctors to use them.

So far, only 15 percent of physicians are using these tools, and they don't really care about whether it improves patient safety or reduces branded drug use. What they do care about is whether ePrescribing saves them time, and whether it saves their office staff time (and hence reduces their over-time payments). In fact, done right, ePrescribing does do those things, but the sponsors of these studies, like the autos and Medco, need to get that message out first, rather than plugging the issues of patient safety and generic substitution. - Matthew