Hospitals Part of eRX Roadmap?
The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) is making available a free report titled The Prescription Infrastructure: Are We Ready for ePrescribing?. Though most prescriptions are done in outpatient and ambulatory care settings, hospitals are also part of the e-prescribing picture as electronic medication administration record (eMAR) would benefit from integration with outpatient medication history. It would make sense for patients to have records that would track their overall health care history, and this would save hospital physicians from chasing family doctors over the phone to obtain prescription information.
Right now pharmacy systems are developped independently for various segments of the health care universe, leaving integration concerns to later times. According to several sources compiled by the report, hospitals and clinics account for 10.5 percent and 9.3 percent of pharmacy purchases respectively, though the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services accounts for these drug costs as part of hospital spending, not pharmaceutical spending.
January 31, 2006 Related topics: Pharmaceuticals, IT & software