Letter from the BWPO Chairman
Dear Colleagues:
As we begin to see the remarkable and unquestionable gains in safety and quality through our inpatient Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) and Electronic Medication Administration Record (eMAR), it’s imperative we make this technology available to our care givers in outpatient settings. As chairman of the BWPO board, I am proud to say that’s exactly what we are doing in conjunction with PHS as part of our High Performance Medicine efforts.
E-prescribing is coming to ambulatory practices and divisions, and that transition is well underway in Otolaryngology and Emergency Medicine, as detailed in this issue of Medical Staff News. Our physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants—all who will be using e-prescribing—are committed to learning this new system and accounting for its nominal increase in time to write a prescription.
While we cannot computerize the quickness and ease of hand-writing a simple prescription, we’ve come as close as we can with e-prescribing through the LMR. And even though it takes a few more seconds than writing a prescription by hand, e-prescribing brings a peace of mind for both physicians and patients. With so many advances in pharmacology and countless drug-drug or drug-allergy interactions to be aware of, the prompts and real-time decision support of e-prescribing are essential to our commitment of delivering the safest care.
In addition to the undeniable safety and quality enhancements that come with e-prescribing, our investment in this technology promises to bring a financial efficiency for our patients, payors and BWH. Our LMR IS programmers have built this system to default to the lowest-cost drug alternatives which clearly benefits both patients and payors. Anytime we can save our patients out-of-pocket expenses, we have an obligation to do so. In addition, we’re contractually obligated to our payors to increase our use of e-prescribing through pay-for-performance.
While financial incentives for both providers and patients are an important for e-prescribing, this is clearly the right thing to do for our patients. The gains in safety and quality that have been so well-documented with eMAR and CPOE are now available for our outpatients, and our leadership at Partners, BWH and the BWPO remains committed to ending the need for prescription pads.
Sincerely,
Steven Seltzer, MD
Chairman, BWPO