By: Lisette Hilton
Date: Dec, 2005
Source: Physicians Practice

Yet fewer than 20 percent of physicians use e-prescribing. Find out why you should be one of them. Soon after implementing an electronic prescribing system in his North Kansas City, Mo., practice, Richard Hellman proudly told a patient that he no longer had to write prescriptions. He'd put away his prescription pad forever. The patient was relieved, Hellman said, because she'd recently been the victim of a serious medical error due to a doctor's illegible handwriting. The woman had been prescribed Cytoxan, a chemotherapeutic agent, but the pharmacist interpreted the prescription as Cytomel, a drug used to treat underactive thyroid.

"She ended up with a hyperactive thyroid with the error," says Hellman, vice president of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists. "She was very grateful [for e-prescribing]...." The industry group e-Health Initiative estimates only 5 percent to 18 percent of practicing physicians use e-prescribing technology, and they tend to be high-prescribers like oncologists, pain management physicians, and those in family practice or internal medicine. But it's inevitable that those ranks will rise.