Focus on Industry-Wide Quality
Setting the standard in health information exchange by aiming to achieve 100% reliability of e-prescribing.
Visit our blog for an interactive discussion of quality as it relates to e-prescribing.
Surescripts' focus on quality is setting the standard in health information exchange by aiming to achieve 100 percent reliability of e-prescribing - from the time a prescription is first prepared by a prescriber to the time the medication is dispensed and at all points in between.
Beyond operating a highly reliable network, Surescripts exists to
improve the overall quality of a process relied on daily by
millions of patients. What's more, that process has not changed in
hundreds of years and was almost entirely paper-based when we got
started. So improving the quality of the prescribing process has
always been our goal, and we have made great strides through our
work with standards, certification, network monitoring and customer
support. What is new is Surescripts' expansion of the quality
program and a corresponding increase in resources.
E-prescribing goes beyond impacting the quality of individual
prescriptions. It creates the means for identifying and making
improvements to the prescribing process nationwide in a way that is
simply not possible with paper.
Because of e-prescribing, the U.S. now has what amounts to a
national air traffic control system for prescriptions. This is made
possible by a nationwide network for e-prescribing that can, in
effect, monitor quality in a way that's never been done before. In
a paper prescribing world, you cannot and therefore do not know
when something goes wrong until months or years later, when a
researcher takes the time to gather and study data in order to
estimate, for example, just how many adverse drug events occur each
year. And while this type of research is important, it is too slow
to be actionable. The goal is to shrink the time between when a
problem is identified and when it is solved. In the paper world,
most problems are never even identified, much less solved - in a
timely manner. With e-prescribing, we now have the opportunity to
identify and solve more problems and to shrink the time it takes to
do both. To put it another way - e-prescribing creates a
manageable system of providing patients with the prescriptions they
need. Problems can be identified and fixed. With paper
prescriptions, phone calls and faxes - there is no manageable
system and, therefore, it is hard to determine what gets solved and
what gets fixed.
We are spending the majority of our time defining, measuring and
analyzing the safety, accuracy and completeness of the electronic
prescriptions that flow through our network. From the patient
encounter to their actual receipt of medications, we are looking at
the process end to end, identifying where the process works well
and where improvements are needed.
We are then acting to improve the process. This includes reporting
to the sender and/or the receiver on any issues we find. We then
work with the participants involved to understand and fix the root
cause of the issues and to control and avoid them moving forward.
We have seen good cooperation and a willingness to correct issues,
which is greatly appreciated.
An additional and very important goal is to ensure that all of
Surescripts' internal processes and procedures are of the highest
quality and value to all constituents. As our efforts to
measure and analyze quality continue to expand and evolve, we are
able to provide more and more critical information and feedback to
software vendors. Collaboration and communication are essential to
realizing continuous improvements in the quality of prescribing
process.
