Washington State Forbids Prescriptions Written in Cursive
Under House Bill 2292 (pdf) enacted by the state of Washington on June 7, health care providers operating there can no longer write prescriptions in cursive since the law states that for legibility “[p]rescriptions for legend drugs must either be hand-printed, typewritten, or generated electronically.” This should vastly reduce the high number of illegible prescriptions according to the Seattle PI.
The bill also significantly increases the number of serious medical errors that must be reported to the state from eight reportable categories of events to more than twenty. The state is to analyse this data to find error and success patterns in it.
June 23, 2006 Related topics: Legal & legislative, Pharmaceuticals