Coalition to provide free prescription software to U.S. doctors

Computerworld - A coalition of technology companies and health care providers today announced a $100 million program to offer free access to electronic prescribing software to all U.S. physicians.

The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative is aimed at overcoming some of the costs and other barriers that prevent physicians from using electronic prescribing software, the coalition said. The software is designed to help eliminate medication errors caused by sloppy handwriting, adverse drug reactions and drug allergies.

These medication errors cause between 8,000 and 9,000 deaths annually, said Newt Gingrich, founder of the Washington-based Center for Health Transformation. "Paper kills," he said. "By definition, a paper prescription does not allow you to automatically check to see if it is contraindicated by other prescriptions or by other factors in an electronic health record. [The new initiative] says to the doctor [that] there is no technical or financial excuse for not being safe."

The program will use eRX Now, Web-based software from Chicago-based Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc. that is used by 20,000 physicians to write electronic prescriptions. Under the new program, the software is available to any physician for free via the Web without any new hardware requirements and with minimal training, according to coalition members.

Allscripts and Dell Inc. are the lead sponsors of the project. Other technology sponsors include Cisco Systems Inc., Fujitsu Computers of America Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft, Corp., Sprint Nextel Corp., SureScripts Inc. and Wolters Kluwer Health Inc. Each will contribute to the cost of the project, which is expected to total more than $100 million over five years.

In addition, Aetna Inc., Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey and Wellpoint Inc. will be offering incentives to physicians to encourage their use of the prescribing software, said Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts.

"We look at e-prescribing as a first step to get physicians onto the electronic health care superhighway," he said.

Tullman added that he is hopeful that the initiative will help spur the electronic health records market, which Allscripts is targeting with software it sells to physicians to record patient data.

More than 99% of pharmacies in the U.S. are connected to the initiative's system, Tullman said, noting that if the others don't join, "we don't expect they will be around" to compete.

Dell will be providing the infrastructure to host the Web-based software.

The electronic prescribing software is designed to allow physicians to quickly generate a prescription that can be sent electronically or by fax to retail pharmacies. All prescriptions are checked for harmful interactions with a patient's other medications.

Today, fewer than one in five physicians use electronic prescribing software, but national studies have shown that 1.5 million people are injured annually from medication errors, and 7,000 of those patients die, said Nancy Dickey, president of the Health Science Center, vice chancellor for health affairs for the Texas A&M University System and former president of the American Medical Association.

However, Dickey noted that physicians, who are asked to absorb the costs of buying the software, installing it and training their staffs, typically don't reap financial benefits from its use.

Large physician groups from 10 states and the District of Columbia have signed onto the project to help encourage physician adoption of the technology.

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