eScribing

The push toward electronic health records coupled with the cumbersome prescription drug process in long-term care, makes electronic prescribing an important goal for the future of resident safety in that setting. The many Medicare Part D plans, with their individual formularies and drug coverages, make it difficult for care givers to prescribe accurate medications in a timely, cost-effective manner without an electronic prescribing solution.

eScribing^® automates the prescription drug process by providing electronic communication between payers, facilities, physicians, and pharmacies and offers eldercare organizations these valuable features:

• A comprehensive drug database
• Immediate patient-specific drug information
• Clinical drug alerts for allergies, drug interactions, and duplicate therapies
• Real-time formulary benefits checks
• A speedy, legible, accurate transfer of data

Facility / Physician Benefits

• Streamlines workload for prescribers and nurses.
• Significantly reduces nursing time spent on order management.
• Increases resident safety.
• Generates accurate flow sheets.

With eScribing, users can select a payer source for a specific resident that will help care givers more accurately prescribe critical drugs, covered by the resident’s health plan. That functionality alone will dramatically increase proactive care and help prevent delays in providing the required attention for residents.

The intuitive ordering system analyzes prescriber’s ordering patterns and displays the physician’s most prescribed drugs to help identify medications paid for by the resident’s health plan. It also allows the prescriber to select the medication with just one click. Physicians can access First DataBank’s complete drug file, which contains all available medications and strengths, and the intelligent design allows users to set up alerts that inform care givers of adverse interactions.

Pharmacy Benefits

The electronic communication between the facility and the pharmacy provides the following functionality and benefits for pharmacists:

• Error reduction
• Improved quality service to the facility
• Cost savings

By enhancing the medication selection capability for doctors and nurses, pharmacies save time and money due to reduced communication needs and transcription errors. Electronic integration with the pharmacy system decreases the number of misread faxes and data input errors, resulting in fewer callbacks to the doctor and more timely medication dispensing for residents.

eScribing improves the quality of service pharmacies provide to facilities by decreasing the number of phone calls from facilities to solve routine medication order questions and inquires about the status of a medication order. eScribing utilizes NCPDP SCRIPT messages to inform the pharmacy of new orders, discontinued orders, and changed orders. Because the order is electronically imported into the pharmacy application, the order entry effort is significantly reduced.