How e-Prescribing Improves Patient Safety
The handwriting prescription can bring a lot of errors in the medical industry. It can be dangerous for patients and may cost them their lives if care is not taken. Every year more than 400,000 patients succumb due to such errors. Most of these errors can be mitigated by technology, such as e-prescribing apps.
E-prescribing is a process that allows physicians and other professionals to help send prescription information to their patients digitally. They can also help to store data as part of the wider diversified electronic and technology systems. If you want to know more about how e-prescribing works, you can visit this website: https://topflightapps.com/ideas/how-to-integrate-e-prescribing-into-a-medical-mobile-app/
Let’s now look at the benefits of e-prescribing to patients.
1. Low Chances of Pharmacist Error
When e-prescribing is compared to handwritten prescribing, e-prescribing will prove extremely clear when it comes to treatment and dosage. It may also require a lesser interpretation of the pharmacist’s part. This can also reduce medication and prescription errors and eventually reducing patient’s deaths contributed by these typing errors. The prescription method ensures that patients get more accurate information about how particular drugs should be taken.
E-prescription can also reduce the high chances of an erroneous dosage, which can also even cause big harm to the patient in the worst-case scenario. One major study found out that when various practices are implemented on an e-prescribing system, medication errors could be reduced to a big percentage of the original levels.
2. Instant Alerts
Mostly, in the US alone, over 5 million visits to the physicians and ERs can be contributed to preventable ADEs (Adverse Drug Events).
Most of these Adverse Drug Events can be brought about by interaction with other treatments, allergies, and other indicators like chronic usage of specific drugs, medications, and high dosages. The e-prescription system is designed in such a way that it has been able to aggregate the patient’s past and current medical history, which includes allergies. The systems will be alerting the clinicians and medical professionals if the prescription can provide interaction with other treatments or even prevent them from prescribing other medications that a client can be allergic to.
Most e-prescription systems will also help to offer notifications regarding duplicate therapies that can help physicians to avoid prescribing several medications for medical signs.
3. Prescription’s Fulfilment Tracking
The e-prescription systems can also help health experts to track whether or not the patients have managed to pick up their next refill. This way, the systems will allow clinicians to know the people who should be at the top of their treatment and who might have stopped from following the prescribed treatment.
With this type of information, the clinicians can follow up on the patients who have been following the e-prescription guidelines and helping them get back to their normal health. This process will help mitigate the re-admissions rate and ensure that patients follow through on various methods of treatment which may need some treatment.
4. Improved Prescription Efficiency
Most handwritings are not visible and may confuse patients. They are also costly and tedious in terms of the time spent because they may need some treatment and then get drawn up and follow up with authorization. With the e-prescription systems, the clinicians can manage to fill out dozens of the RXs within a very short time. It will improve efficiency and also help minimize error rates.
The clinicians can also manage to quickly allow a faster refill in the various cases where the patients may have lost treatment records. This may also happen when a patient has left medicine at home.
5. Reduces Patients’ Re-admissions
According to statistics, over 1.6 million patients are readmitted every year. Adverse reactions to drugs cause 13% of these cases. Out of the 13%, 95% are due to inappropriate prescriptions, including failure to consider their side effects.
When a client’s information is integrated with the record that provides access to the information after drug history and allergies, the chances are that majority of errors will be reduced.
E-prescriptions also help give the clinician much better information about the various potential interactions and other side effects that they may apply to information about their prescription practices.