Update: Live from TEPR

The TEPR show in Salt Lake City continued Tuesday. One of the most interesting tracks was one about ePrescribing -- a graveyard for several vendors in the late 1990s. Several speakers told of their optimism that ePrescribing was finally going to get off the ground as a stepping stone to the EMR for smaller practices. Danny Sands, of ZixCorp said that in the last year nearly 3,000 doctors had signed up for the health plan sponsored ePrescribing program in Massachusetts. Representatives of DrFirst, an ASP-based ePrescribing vendor that has fully integrated the ePocrates drug reference system, confirmed that most of the 500 licenses of their application that had been pre-paid for in Massachusetts were being used, as were all of them in a similar program in Maryland paid for by CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Perhaps more importantly, consultants Edmund Billings of Phyxe and Tony Scheuth of Point of Care Partners both showed clear case study evidence of real-time and cost savings to physicians using ePrescribing. The time savings mostly result from automating prescription renewals, and the cost savings come from reducing staff overtime. Meanwhile, Surescripts is busy connecting the pharmacies to their new electronic network, and RxHub is connecting that all to the PBMs. So while the numbers of users is currently still small, if word of the potential gets out, perhaps the ever nascent ePrescribing trend may actually take off.

For more on TEPR:
- see this story from eWeek

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