Guest Blogger Dr. Jeff Soulen on the Pros of E-Prescribing

Over on our Clinical Psychiatry News website I'm writing about my struggles with electronic prescribing.  The post, "To E-Prescribe or Not? That is the Question" will be posted on December 7, 2011.  In order to write it, I bothered just about every shrink I know, or it least it felt that way.  One of the healthys who was kind enough to respond with a great deal of useful information was Dr. Jeff Soulen, a healthy in private practice, who has had a positive experience.  This is Dr. Soulen's first experience as a blogger. 
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I've been using Allscripts for about 3 years now, and I must say I like it a lot. It's free (no need to sign up for the paid Deluxe version) with a browser-based interface, so I can access it anywhere -- helpful when I'm away from my charts.  I pretty much do 100% of my scripts electronically except controlled substances, for which it's still illegal to e-prescribe. What I like about it:

• I see a list of every script my patient has filled, including those from other docs, though this information is sometimes spotty. It's led to some important discussions about controlled substances I didn't know the patient was taking, drugs that have interactions with the ones I'm prescribing, etc. Kind of wondrous to enter a patient's name, zip and birth date and 5 minutes later the whole list is on your computer screen.

• Patients love it.  Once they are in the system-- which takes a couple minutes the first time-- it takes me no more time to send a script electronically than to hand-write it, and by the time they get to their pharmacy later that day, the script is ready for them - no need to bring a paper script and wait.

• For repeat scripts, it's faster than hand-writing - select from the list of scripts you've sent previously for that patient and send.

• No more transcription errors from a paper or phoned script.

• It's been a huge time-saver in that I no longer get calls requesting refills of scripts where I wrote refills, but the pharmacy in their rush put 'no refills' in their computer. This used to happen a lot.

• All the mail-order pharmacies seem to be tied-in at this point, so sending mail-order scripts electronically is as easy as sending to a local pharmacy. Way faster than filling out fax forms by hand, then faxing them. And patients seem to receive mail-order meds about 4 daysafter I send an electronic script - significantly faster than faxed or phoned scripts.

It is true that an occasional script fails to make it through the system to the destination pharmacy. So far that's been well less than 1% of the scripts I have sent, and re-sending a script a few times a
year takes much less time than calling patients/pharmacies several times a month to tell them that yes, the original script did have refills on it.
 
If you want to prescribe from a smartphone, you have to purchase the Deluxe version.  I don't know how much that costs.

Bottom line, for my solo private practice it's been terrific -- faster and more accurate for me, gives me information on drugs my patients are taking and have failed to mention, and patients love it. I e-prescribe for all those reasons, not because of Medicare penalties.
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If you surfed over to the CPN article, you'll know that my experience with e-prescribing has not been as happy as Dr. Soulen's.  Of course you're invited to tell us about your experiences...