Health IT Quality

Today, Tuesday, July 31st, at noon ET, we will be announcing the winners of the 7th annual Safe-Rx Awards, created by Surescripts to recognize those states that are showing genuine vision and commitment to transforming health care delivery through health information technology and e-prescribing.

Many of you will be tuning in to the 2012 London Olympics over the next couple of weeks to see the fastest, strongest and best athletes compete in their field. The Safe-Rx Awards are the Olympics of the health IT realm. Our winning states are leading the nation – and the world – in improving health care safety, quality and cost-efficiency.

The stakes are higher than ever. Private and public sector health reform efforts all share the twin objectives of lowering cost and improving quality of care. New health delivery models like accountable care organizations and medical homes will be measured against those goals. But they cannot succeed without the support of effective health IT systems.

E-prescribing, the most widely utilized of the health information technologies, plays a critical role in improving outcomes. Most notably, it , significantly decreasing adverse health events in patients while at the same time improving cost-efficiency. And studies have shown that e-prescribing improves medication adherence, keeping patients healthy and avoiding expensive rehospitalizations.

This explains the growing excitement around health IT. Less than four years ago, fewer than one in ten doctors had gone digital. Today, a majority of physicians in the United States are using e-prescribing systems to improve patient care and reduce medical errors. This is exactly what we want. The more states that embrace the future of health care delivery, the more we ALL win.

So, we will celebrate the most forward-thinking states as shining examples to the world of what can be accomplished when you strive to be the best you can be. Next year it could be a photo finish!

I would like to conduct some simple research with a few interested prescribers.  We'll look at prescription content quality before and after certain actions are taken to see what is most impactful to improving accuracy and completeness.  I expect about four hours would be needed over the course of the next six months.  Please contact us through the comment form below, or let your vendor know that you would like to work with Surescripts on a quality research project that you read about on this blog.

A recent article published by researchers at Weill Cornell Medical College indicates that e-prescribing reduced prescribing errors by a factor of seven.

We are reviewing this article to understand the methodology and categorization decisions that they made.

Do you have any comments on this article or other related research regarding the accuracy of e-prescribing compared to other methods of delivery? If so, please add a comment to this posting with the link below.