Challenges and Opportunities in E-Prescribing

What do you think about e-prescribing? Do you think that physicians want to use e-prescribing resources? At the HIMSS Virtual Conference, there was a session titled, "E-Prescribing: Physician Acceptance is the Easy Part." Do you really think that's true? Is physician acceptance really the easy part? Maybe it really depends on the physician. Those who embrace EHR (electronic health record) technology find it really easy to use e-prescribing since it only takes a click of a button to get a script sent to the pharmacy. Now that ARRA will be pushing physicians, we should see a dramatic rise in the use of EHRs and e-prescribing. At that point, physician acceptance will be the easiest part. What will be the hard part?

Here's the abstract of the session: "Two years ago, Cotton O’Neil Clinics in Topeka, Kansas implemented e-Prescribing for over 125 physicians and 135 pharmacies. In January, 2009, Cotton O’Neil processed more than 23,000 e-Prescriptions including those in rural communities with populations of 1,000 or fewer. This presentation will detail the processes used to move Topeka and the surrounding community to successful use of e-Prescribing technology."

The speakers were Judy Corzine, MBA, CPHIMS and Gray Woods, MD. In case you may be interested, here are their bios:

• Judy Corzine, Administrative Director and CIO, Stormont-Vail Healthcare, Topeka, Kansas. Judy Corzine has worked in the information system department at Stormont-Vail Healthcare for the past 8 years. Prior to moving to Topeka, she worked at several healthcare organizations in Waterloo, Iowa. She holds an MBA from the University of Iowa and became a CPHIMS in April, 2005. She is a member of CHIME and serves as Chair of the HIMSS Enterprise Integration Steering Committee.

• Dr. Gray Woods, Clinical Information Systems Associate, Stormont-Vail HealthCare, Topeka, Kansas. Dr. Woods has been a member of the IS team at Stormont-Vail since August, 2005 supporting the NextGen EMR application and providing training to physicians, nurses and other clinical staff. He is a board-certified ophthalmologist and was formerly the Medical Director of the Ophthalmology Residency Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) School of Medicine. Dr. Woods obtained his MD degree from UMKC in 1983 and completed his ophthalmology residency there in 1987.