SURESCRIPTS CERTIFICATION

Follow

WHY DO YOU NEED IT?

In order to electronically route prescriptions and search patient specific eligibility, formulary, and medication history, your application must achieve Surescripts certification.  Even when integrating with a Surescripts certified vendor such as DoseSpot, Surescripts still requires a quick certification meeting to “go live”.

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE SURESCRIPTS CERTIFICATION?

When using DoseSpot, your application will have to pass a quick screen demo test that includes different validation scenarios and the ability to send Surescripts messages appropriately in the backend.

WHAT’S THE MINIMUM FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU NEED TO PASS?

If you are using DoseSpot’s e-prescribing application, the minimum functionality to pass Surescripts certification is the following:

– Method to pop the DoseSpot application in a browser from your application (using credentials & passing your patient information) and receive the DoseSpotPatientID back from DoseSpot.

– Prescribe within DoseSpot (nothing you need to do here)

– Use the DoseSpot API to check for refill requests and transmission errors in DoseSpot and provide a link within your software to DoseSpot for fulfillment.

– Appropriately validate a patient’s demographic information before sending it to DoseSpot

Electronic Prescribing for Dentistry!

Follow

The medical industry has been using electronic prescribing (“e-Prescribing”) for over a decade now. The dental industry hasn’t quite caught up.  In fact, in a recent personal survey I noticed dental practice management systems don’t provide medications in a coded format.  Meaning, the medications are free text fields and the practice hand enters the medications into the system.  This will end up limiting the user of these systems from ePrescribing, drug-to-drug alerts, drug monographs and many other features common in electronic medical record (EMR) systems.

The advantages for adopting ePrescribing are vast:

Patient Safety

The electronic prescription reduces prescriptions errors caused by illegible hand writing, drug-to-drug interactions, incorrect dosing, drug allergy reactions, duplication of drugs, etc.

Fraud and Crime

The medication history his saved electronically and can be monitored easier than paper.

Medication Adherence

Patients are more likely to fill prescriptions as they’ll be waiting at the pharmacy for pickup.  The refill process is also expedited without multiple phone calls between patient, provider, and pharmacy.

Real-time communication

Providers can write notes that follow the prescription to the pharmacist. Pharmacists can submit refill request on behalf of the patient for approval by the physician (no phone call needed).

Decision Support

Health care professionals will have critical drug alerts and patient specific information at the time of prescribing.

Government Regulations

In January 2011, the state of Minnesota released a mandate for all Prescribing Providers to electronically prescribe medications.  This mandate includes dentists.  The rule wasn’t put in place to punish dentists.  It was actually designed to bring dentist into the fold of sharing health information.

Most dental Practice Management Systems don’t have electronic prescribing capabilities.  In the next few years a number of these companies will begin adding ePrescribing capabilities.  A company called DoseSpot has developed a dental e-prescribing application accessible from the web.  The dental industry is about change the way it prescribes medications.  Stay tuned…

ePrescribe Controlled Substances in 2010?

Follow

After a long anticipated wait, the DEA is revising its regulations to provide prescribers the ability to electronically prescribe controlled substances.

On June 27, 2008, DEA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to revise the regulation to allow creation, signature, transmission and processing of controlled substances electronically. The DEA gave consideration to over 200 comments while drafting the IFR.

The DEA’s obligation as noted in the rule, is to ensure that the regulations minimize, to the greatest extent possible, the potential for diversion of a controlled substance resulting from non-registrants gaining access to electronic prescribing applications and systems.  The concern of insufficient Security has been the main barrier to allowing the ePrescription of controlled substances.  The authentication methods used in online or desktop applications is generally username and password.  Passwords are easily guessed or broken by using various password guessing programs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Charting the next steps for e-prescribing policy

Follow

When e-prescribing first figured in the health policy scene in 2003, policymakers viewed it as a “low-hanging fruit” among myriad IT initiatives aimed at pushing doctors to convert their charts to electronic formats.

Hopes were high because e-prescribing was seen to provide immediate benefits that could greatly improve the delivery of quality health care and speed up the migration to electronic health records.

Although major progress has been made in improving the functionality and interoperability of e-prescribing, recent studies have pointed out that fewer than one in ten doctors have adopted the electronic system.
Read the rest of this entry »

Progress of electronic prescribing standards

Follow

The shift to e-prescribing systems was formalized in 2003 with the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (MMA). One of its features is an outpatient prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries, or what is commonly referred to as Part D, which began in 2006.

The law mandated the use of “electronic prescription program” should any Part D plan providers and pharmacies voluntarily choose to prescribe using computer systems. It also called for the establishment of standards for the electronic transmission of prescriptions and certain other information for covered Part D drugs.

Health and Human Services Michael O. Leavitt reported in 2007 that Prescription Drug Plan (PDP) sponsors, Medicare Advantage (MA) Organizations offering Medicare Advantage-Prescription Drug (MA-PD) plans and other Part D sponsors “must support and comply with electronic prescribing standards when communicating with prescribers who want to use e-prescribing technology.”

Read the rest of this entry »

E-prescribing promises quick ROI, lower medication costs

Follow

One of the barriers in the swift adoption of electronic prescribing is the high switching cost associated with migrating from paper to e-format, but several studies have shown the investment is worth the potential savings in the future.

A study based on e-prescribing in Massachusetts found that doctors who used e-prescribing systems could save $0.70 per patient per month, which translates to $845,000 annually per 100,000 insured patients filling prescriptions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Incentive payments for e-prescribers

Follow

In its bid to entice more providers to shift to electronic prescribing, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has started this year incentive payments of up to 2 percent to physicians and other eligible professionals who use the technology

For 2009, to be a “successful e-prescriber,” eligible professionals must report the e-prescribing quality measure through their Medicare Part B claims on at least 50 percent of applicable cases during the reporting year.

Read the rest of this entry »

E-prescribing triggers more prescription of controlled substances

Follow

A shift from handwritten to computer-generated prescriptions was associated with a substantial increase in the proportion of controlled substances prescribed out in a New York hospital.

The removal of an impediment to prescription writing was linked to the rise in Schedule II opioids and benzodiazepines prescriptions at the emergency department of the Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center in New York, researchers claimed.

“Simple regulatory changes and lifting of barriers, such as the utilization of electronic prescriptions, can make significant changes to practice patterns and may change the way patients are treated,” the authors wrote in a study published recently by the Academy Emergency Medicine journal.

The study compared the changes in opioid and benzodiazepine prescriptions before and after the New York State implemented the “Official Prescription Program,” which was designed to reduce the amount of drugs diverted from legitimate medical use by preventing alterations, forgeries and counterfeiting of prescriptions.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stakeholders await final DEA rule to lift E-prescription ban for controlled substances

Follow

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) unveiled last year proposed regulations that would provide physicians and authorized prescribers with the option of issuing electronic prescriptions for controlled substances.

The agency had sought public comment on DEA’s draft rule #1117-AA61, titled “Electronic Prescriptions for Controlled Substances.” One year later, stakeholders are still waiting for DEA’s final decision to lift the e-prescribing moratorium on controlled substances.

In one of the recent developments, a bi-partisan group of senators has sent a letter in May to Attorney General Eric Holder and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking for a final resolution on the proposal.

The 11 senators, who signed the letter, said, “E-prescribing is held back by the DEA,” which requires a parallel paper system for scheduled pharmaceuticals. “Obviously, having to run two systems compromises any savings from e-prescribing,” they wrote.

Read the rest of this entry »

A CCHIT Based Guide to Qualified E-prescribing System – The First decision

Follow

Now that we’ve taken a look at the whole of what is deemed a qualified e-prescribing system in the eyes of CCHIT, I think its time to get into the weeds a bit and see what those high level requirements really mean.  Just as we have to crawl before we walk, I’m going to address the primary goal of getting a prescription order from your EHR to the pharmacy for fulfillment.  It’s a straightforward requirement, but there are a lot of things you must think about before being ready to e-prescribe.

The reality is that any transactions between your system and the pharmacy system will be handled by a third party delivery service.  This service company is Surescripts RxHub.  Some may be familiar with the history of the company, but for those not, in a nutshell they used to be two companies serving two very different user bases.  Surescripts worked with the retail pharmacies, while Rx Hub worked with the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (in other words, the insurers).   I’m sure Surescripts RxNorm are working towards a unified system, but until then you can still think of Surescripts RxHub as two different systems.

Implementing ePrescribing for the first time will be a lot of development work, so if you wanted to stage the development over time and get more bang for your buck it may be a good idea to start with one group rather than the whole kit and caboodle.

Read the rest of this entry »