Advocates of measures to improve the efficiency of health care have been advocating electronic prescribing for many years, and if recent efforts in this area are anything to go by, as many as 75% of doctors might be using e-prescriptions in just five years. E-prescriptions are paperless prescriptions, written electronically by your doctor and sent electronically to your pharmacy. No print-outs are involved at all – your doctor doesn’t print you a copy, and a copy isn’t faxed to your pharmacy. All the work is done electronically.

What Are the Benefits of Electronic Prescriptions?

Adopting an e-prescribing system has a number of benefits for both doctors and patients. The system is more efficient, potentially saving millions of dollars in health care expenditure, and meaning shorter waits for people getting prescriptions filled. More importantly, it could completely eliminate the harmful errors that can result when a doctor’s handwriting is misread by a pharmacist. (more…)