Carol Steltenkamp, M.C., CMIO, University of Kentucky HealthCare in Lexington, recently spoke with Healthcare Informatics about enterprise-wide e-prescribing and supporting the use of it among affiliated community physicians in Lexington. Below are excerpts of her comments to Healthcare Informatics. Read the complete Healthcare Informatics article.
“Just having that information available on a give-and-take basis is huge,” says Carol Steltenkamp. “As an academic medical center, [UK HealthCare], it is our job to be teaching the physicians of the future and they need to be doing this.”
According to Healthcare Informatics, Steltenkamp cites the improved safety and access of e-prescribing as a principal reason why. Her concerns about patient safety and prescribing errors are echoed in a recent study in The Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study, funded by the Washington-based Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, found that a group of primary care practices in New York reduced their prescribing error rate from 42.5 percent to 6.6 percent over a one year period using e-prescribing.
Steltenkamp goes further when she notes that e-prescribing alone, even when not accompanied by full EMR adoption on the part of individual physicians, is proving its merit. Though the EMR adoption rate among physicians in her community remains at around 30 to 40 percent, she sees e-prescribing alone as improving the quality of care, simply based on the fact that community physicians logging onto the hospital's physician portal are able to check the prescription information that the hospital has on their patients. In addition, the hospital can always fax a clear print out of the prescription to the physician office.
“Our challenge is to bring value to our community physicians,” adds Steltenkamp. “We want to hold out the carrot, not the stick. The message needs to be that you really need to work with the providers and e-prescribing is a way to facilitate the good care that they're giving, not hinder it.”