UW And Everett Clinic Aim To Make Outpatient Prescribing Safer

By Christine Callo

Doctor's hand-written prescriptions may someday be a memory. No longer will patients have to worry about pocketing and losing those small pieces of paper, or trying to decipher physicians' illegible handwriting. A solution may be at hand in the form of electronic prescribing.

As many as 98,000 deaths due to medical errors have occurred annually since 1999, according to the Institute of Medicine, and the current system of "write-and-hand-out" prescribing has contributed to that statistic. Some 7,000 of these deaths are from medication errors, and although not all of those come from prescription problems, the figure underscores the need to improve safety and reduce errors. The need for safety provides an important impetus to develop a computerized network so that physicians and pharmacies can keep a tight check on medications prescribed to patients.

Recently, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services received $139 million to fund and promote the uses of health information technology (HIT). The funding is part of President Bush's initiative to improve the nation's health care system and lower the country's healthcare costs.

Among the recipients of AHRQ grants are the University of Washington School of Pharmacy and the Everett Clinic, which were awarded $1.03 million. The two organizations are collaborating to study computerized prescribing in an outpatient setting. The Everett Clinic's CliniTech and Providence Everett Medical Center are contributing to the three-year effort to demonstrate how electronic prescribing will improve safety for patients.

Electronic prescribing allows physicians to use hand-held or laptop computers to write prescriptions, which will then become incorporated into the patient's permanent medical file. The computer could catch mistakes in drug choice or dosages incompatible with a petient's current condition. Prescriptions are then faxed to pharmacies.

"The grant provides the UW School of Pharmacy an unprecedented opportunity to participate in the national initiative that will demonstrate the value of information technology to improve the quality of health care provided to our patients and improve efficiencies in the health care system," says Beth Devine, research assistant professor and associate director of the Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research and Policy Program at the UW School of Pharmacy.

Christine Callo is an undergraduate studying general biology and comparative history of ideas at the University of Washington.