There have been great advances in the last decade in information technology and it has impacted many facets of our lives, from the way we purchase goods, keep in touch with loved ones, or perform our jobs. There has been a push from the federal government to use these advances in the health field in the form of electronic record keeping and communications to streamline the way prescriptions are distributed to patients. Pharmacists are a vital part of implementing these advances in a way that improves the lives of patients by adopting something called e-prescribing into their everyday practice. E-prescribing enables licensed health care professionals to transmit prescriptions via the Internet, instead of writing them on paper.

E-prescribing benefits patients in many ways:

Improved patient safety:

• Problems resulting from poorly hand-written prescriptions are eliminated – decreasing the risk of medication errors and decreasing liability risks.
• Access to patient's medical history – Knowing the patient's medical history at the time of prescribing can serve as an alert as to whether or not a drug is appropriate for a patient.
• Alert systems – Medication errors are often the result of insufficient access to current drug reference information. Checks can be made against the patient's current medications for drug-drug interactions, drug-allergy interactions, diagnoses, body weight, age, drug appropriateness, correct dosing; adverse reactions, duplicate therapy alert etc. and alerts the provider if interactions are found.
• Increases the chance that patients will take their medications as required. It is estimated that 20% of paper-based prescription orders go unfilled by the patient. E-prescribing expedites the filling of prescriptions at the pharmacy and drug literature can be printed for patients as well.

Convenience for the patient:

E-prescribing reduces patient trips to the pharmacy and reduces wait times by streamlining the refill's requests and authorization processes. Refill authorization from the pharmacy can be a completely automated process. The pharmacist generates a refill request/authorization that is delivered through the network to the provider's system, the provider then reviews the request, approves or denies the refill and the pharmacy system is immediately updated.

Convenience for the healthcare professionals:

• Offers true provider mobility – E-prescribing offers full mobility because it can be accessed using a wireless network to write or authorize prescriptions anytime from anywhere.
• Improves reporting ability – Enables pharmacists to perform searches of prescription data that would be impossible with paper prescription systems. For example, a pharmacist could review electronic records to find all of the patients who have had a particular medication prescribed to them during a drug recall.

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