At present, e-prescribing software is considered to be one of the most popular and widely used technologies in the healthcare industry.
According to a recent report by Deloitte, over 75% of the GPs and practice nurses have tried or already implemented this digital solution in their daily practices.
And that’s not a surprise, since e-prescription software is the advanced solution targeted at minimizing medical errors in healthcare and upgrading the traditional prescription process to a new level.
E-prescribing or eRx software enables the prescription delivery from a doctor to the pharmacist, hospital administrator, or insurer accurately, quickly, and effortlessly.
In this article, we’ll uncover what e-prescription software is, its potential, benefits, and critical features that make it a must-use technology for the healthcare industry. Also, you’ll be able to discover the potential challenges while creating the eRx software and how to resolve them effectively.
What Is E-Prescribing Software?
The e-prescribing software is an easy-to-use yet customizable digital system that enables quick, simple, and effective drug prescribing.
Additionally, it assists in finding critical medical information about any kind of drugs, creating and sending the prescriptions in just a few clicks.
The main goal of this healthcare technology is to enhance the current prescription process that can help to minimize medication errors with the standalone software solution.
The electronic prescribing software has plenty of useful features targeted on a quick yet effective drug prescribing, that can be used on different devices anytime and from anywhere.
Meanwhile, the software agility allows its easy integration with the other popular healthcare systems, such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems.
With the eRx software implementation, it’s possible to eliminate the causes of medication errors and reduce the spendings on their coverage. For instance, the US can save up on medication error spendings that now has reached $40 billion per year. Impressive, isn’t it?
Last but not least, there are lots of different types of e-prescription software depending on the scopes they’re used in. For instance, you can now meet this technology in the e-prescribing software for dentists, or else e-prescribing software for physicians, etc.
With the specific features of each field, this software offers a wide range of useful e-prescribing tools for effective yet quick drug orders.
The Main Advantages of E-Prescription Software
Having uncovered what e-prescribing software is, it’s essential to find out the major benefits this type of software can bring to your organization. Here, we will analyze the most critical advantages of the eRx software that can help improve your current business performance.
Enables the Paperless Prescription Management
Due to the system versatility and advanced performance, the e-prescribing software can significantly enhance the office workflow with digital data management.
It allows simplifying the paperwork, quickly accessing any drug information and patient’s electronic health records, effective medical data sharing, seamless integration with other systems, and more.
With all these tasks digitized and optimized, the healthcare providers can achieve much better performance and advanced management of the key workflow processes, and also enhance the quality of their medical services for patients as well.
Offers a Real-Time Prescription
It also enables reviewing the patient prescription history from Pharmacies and PBM/Payers in real-time, which means medical staff won’t spend tons of their time reviewing the paper archives.
Additionally, they can ensure they’ve covered all the critical patient information and prescribe the drugs that work best for their specific health condition.
Meanwhile, the medical staff gets full access to the integrated drug reference library, which minimizes the possibility of medication errors.
Increases Treatment Safety
One of the core advantages of using electronic prescription systems is their ability to decrease the errors that occurred as a result of handwriting illegibility and misinterpretation.
The patient is more secured from the medication errors by the real-time interaction checking with user-customizable alert levels.
For instance, the system can check the compatibility of different types of drugs, the possible allergies, and the drug’s impact on the existing diseases (if there are any)
With the drug reference libraries, the patients can get advanced information of the treatment process, including the details regarding:
- general warnings
- pregnancy
- lactation
- side effects
- usage monographs
- dosing monographs
- compatibility with foods and more
All these advantages have proven the fact that electronic prescription software is an advanced solution that is important not only for healthcare organizations but for their patients as well. With this digital set of tools implemented, the medical institutions can minimize the possible medication issues and also enhance the quality of their services and their working performance as well.
What Are the Integral Features of E-Prescription Software?
Needless to say, the effective yet cost-efficient approach to implementing electronic prescription software in the healthcare organization is developing your own digital solution. However, the e-prescribing software cost is directly linked to the features you want to get with this technology.
That is why the best practices of developing any type of medicare software recommend creating a list of all the must-have features of the electronic prescription systems.
This way you’ll ensure the effective spending of your investments and set up the clear requirements for developing your individual e-prescription software.
So, what features should you include when developing electronic prescription systems?
- Electronic prescriptions sending. Make sure the software is connected with the nationwide prescription network so that you can immediately send the prescriptions to any pharmacies online.
- The immediate e-send response from pharmacies. Reduce the time needed to ask for the drug availability and the locations where the patients can receive it.
- Advanced drug search. Add the searching by name, nickname, generic, brand, Rx OTC, class, or any other common indications to enable quick yet effective drug ordering.
- E-refill: A great feature that enables effortless review and immediate response to any of the refill requests (like one-click refills or one-click new Rx creation).
- E-cancellation. E prescribing software for pharmacies should also send the order cancellations and updates.
- Creating premade lists for each patient. Allows issuing the prescription in one just a click, thus minimizing the time needed for the drug prescribing.
- Device-friendly interface. Make sure the e-prescription software is available for use on any device, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and all major browsers to ensure the medical staff can effortlessly access the system using the most convenient methods.
- Dosing calculator. A critical tool for a fast calculation of the drug dose based on the patient’s specific health characteristics like weight or diseases.
- Digital solution to the non-electronic pharmacies. To increase the versatility of your system, including the conversion of the e-send prescriptions to fax or any other methods available (for instance, message, email, letter, or phone notification).
- Intrahospital staff communication. Instead of paper-based systems, it’s more resource-effective to use digital communication when the medical staff needs consultation of other specialists when prescribing drugs for specific disease cases.
- Clinical decision support. To make the most of the digital treatment recommendations, it’s important to implement rule-based or AI-based programs that can automatically warn medical staff about the specific health characteristics that can impact the drug prescription (like pregnancy, allergies, drug to drug or drug to food compatibility and more)
With these simple yet effective tools added to your electronic prescribing software, your organization will get a powerful solution for providing convenient, effective yet feature-rich services to patients.
Common Mistakes When Developing a Custom E-Prescription Software
Along with the key features to include in your electronic prescribing software, there are some critical mistakes developers should avoid following the HIPAA requirements.
In fact, even the incorrect data storage that lots of organizations manipulate to reduce the e-prescribing software cost can result in millions of dollars lost.
Here are the most common mistakes to keep in mind to prevent HIPAA rules violations:
- Deleting or copying the electronic physical health information (ePHI) from a healthcare facility — this practice can easily result in medical data loss, and also is a serious violation of the law.
- The inappropriate ePHI access control — the medical staff should operate only with the accessible data of their patients. This leads to a high possibility of a data breach, and the accidents of sharing private patient information with third parties.
- Incorrect storage period of electronic healthcare records — though HIPAA doesn’t specify the exact time of the information storage, it’s still critical to take into consideration the local law requirements regarding the information storage to prevent violations.
- The inability to obtain health information per patient’s request — the developers should enable the option of accessing their personal health data by patients. But also, mind the patient identification, since it can result in a serious HIPAA violation as well.
- Vulnerability of the data storage — any storage media (no matter if it’s electronic or paper) must be protected 24/7, according to the HIPAA rules. That is why make sure to include the passwords or a biometric verification system in your e-prescribing software.
Conclusion
As you can see, electronic prescription software has already become an integral medical technology of healthcare organizations throughout the world.
By implementing the innovative healthcare IT solutions and software services, it is now possible to enhance the quality of the fundamental medicare services, improve the workflow of the healthcare institutions and enable performing the successful treatment processes which result in a better patient conversion.
Our top-rated developers know how essential it is to implement innovative technologies and the latest approaches for healthcare companies and their workforces. That is why we’re always researching for the best technologies that perfectly fit right to the specific needs and goals of each organization.
Are you looking for assistance in developing your next digital project?
Contact our experts right now to uncover the essential information about the eRx software, summarizing the e-prescribing software cost and how this technology can benefit your business today!
