Thursday, June 4, 2009

More Fun with Electronic Prescribing

Scenario:
We send a refill request to Dr. XYZ for a patient's medication and get back a faxed note which reads, "NEVER seen by Dr. XYZ'--- please send to primary care doctor."
We retrieve the hard copy which unmistakably shows "Electronically signed by Dr. XYZ".
We send BACK the refill request and attach a copy of the previous prescription, highlighting the 'Dr. XYZ' part on it, almost like you'd do for someone who has trouble reading. We have NO time for this, but we must do it anyway.

Later in the day we get a new prescripton from Dr. XYZ for the medication we requested.

This happened not once today, but three times.

Something is not working here. It's not like Dr. XYZ pulled a prescription pad out of his pocket, scribbled it out and slipped it to the patient. The thing is computer-generated, saved, archived --- there's a TRAIL here. It's in the electronic medical record, isn't it?

Just another reminder that the system is only as good as the humans using it. And today they weren't paying attention.

2 comments:

Grumpy, M.D. said...

And ya paid 30 cents each for this crap.

Dr. XYZ (or whichever flunky is doing his e-scripts) is asleep at the wheel.

In case you missed it check out my and TAP's posts on this issue.

http://drgrumpyinthehouse.blogspot.com/2009/05/e-prescribing-crap.html

pharmacy student said...

I was about to mention that it cost you guys 30 cents , but grumpy md beat me to it. bureaucracy is fun :/

things will only get worse before they have start to get better. imagine the turmoil the current system will cause if it was mandatory for all pharmacies