HHS to pay doctors to use prescription systems

[flashl]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will use financial incentives to encourage more doctors to use electronic prescribing systems to reduce medical errors, the Health and Human Services Department secretary said at a press conference on Monday.

Mike Leavitt said illegible physician handwriting on prescriptions results in drug errors that cause adverse reactions for 1.5 million Americans every year and requires pharmacists to make 150 million phone calls annually to doctors to decipher their prescription. "That's a lot of people injured due to bad handwriting," he said.

In 2009 and 2010, Medicare will pay clinicians 2 percent of the total allowable Medicare charges that a clinician files that year. The payment drops to 1 percent of Medicare charges in 2011 and 2012, and then to 0.5 percent in 2013. The incentive payments, Leavitt said, should serve be powerful motivation for adoption of e-prescribing systems.

After using this carrot approach, Medicare will use a stick to convince clinicians to use e-prescribing systems. After 2012 doctors who do not use e-prescribing systems will be hit with an unspecified reduction in payment, Leavitt said.

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[Jim__]

1. I always wondered how pharmacists could read those prescriptions.

I guess they can't always read them.

[Heddi]

2. They can't...and nurses can't either

I work night shift, and my motto is....when in doubt, make sure to call at 3am to clarify that "as needed" order for aspirin. I figure there is no better way to get a point across like negative reinforcement. If you can't write in a way that anyone can read, then you will get called about it, have the order clarified, and I don't give a shit WHAT time of day or night it is. Want to avoid mundane calls at 3am? Simple. WRITE NORMALLY.

Washington State just passed a law last year that all prescriptions have to either be PRINTED (no cursive) or preferably typed out to avoid confusion.

There's also a problem with medical abbreviations. QD can mean "Q day" (every day...quaque die in latin) or depending on how they write the Q it could look like OD, or "other day".

Units, like insulin and heparin, should be written as "units" and not "u" because the 'u' can be mistaken for a "m" or other things.

So now in WA the Rx has to be typed out.

Many hospitals and medical facilities are also going to computer-based charting, where there is no worry about illegible handwriting because there is no handwriting. All typed out. THAT makes it alot better. Nothing worse than not being able to read a damn DIAGNOSIS...much less which medications to give because you can't read the MD's handwriting (or Nurse's handwriting...gah...we've got some Doozies in my field as well)