| EMR
technology contributes to medical practice in four ways:
cost
reduction, revenue
enhancement, administrative
efficiency, clinical
efficiency.
Medical error reduction,
disease management, lab result management
Four out of five physician office visits leave with
at least one prescription representing approximately
3 billion prescriptions dispensed each year. The Institute
for Safe Medicine Practices has estimated that pharmacists
place more than 150 million calls to physicians asking
for clarification. Forrester Research estimates the
number of prescription-related telephone calls is 900
million with nearly 500 million calls made to the pharmacy
for refill approvals alone.
More than 3 million of the 8.8 million adverse drug
events that occur each year in ambulatory care are preventable
and result from illegible handwriting, unclear abbreviations
and doses, unclear telephone or verbal orders, and ambiguous
orders.
EMR reduces
+ prescribing errors (ignorance about drug interactions,
errors in writing the name or dose)
+ dispensing errors (prescription correctness, inaccurate
dosage calculation)
+ administration errors (wrong patient, wrong dose or
strength, wrong time or frequency)
EMR also helps management of
+ recalled medications
+ patient followup
+ electronic interface to download lab results |
