The eMPOWERx e-prescribing tool offers clinicians access to patient prescription histories, interaction alerts, and the secure transmission of prescriptions directly to the pharmacy.

The eMPOWERx e-prescribing tool offers patient prescription histories, interaction checking, and the secure transmission of scripts directly to the pharmacy. Patients benefit from their providers’ ability to quickly access their medication history and critical drug information at the point of care, ultimately resulting in a reduced risk of medication errors and/or adverse events.

By introducing electronic prescribing methods, medication delivery is a safer and more efficient process. Error-prone approaches to prescribing are replaced with clean, electronic prescriptions, reducing the risk of medication errors associated with poor handwriting, illegible faxes, and additional key strokes.

Electronic prescribing enables the secure transmission of data from the prescriber’s fingertips to the pharmacist’s eyes. Recent studies show that 4 out of 5 patients who visit a healthcare provider leave with at least one prescription – totaling more than 3.2 billion prescriptions annually nationwide – and pharmacists make 150 million phone calls each year to clarify those prescriptions. Considering these staggering numbers, e-prescribing offers tremendous benefits within the healthcare system, including:

• Efficiency – Clinicians can instantly check each prescription electronically, as it is written, for problems such as drug interactions, allergies, duplicate therapies and formulary conflicts, without having to juggle patient files and reference materials beforehand. Time spent playing “telephone tag” and faxing to clarify and refill prescriptions is also minimized, affording more time for patient care.
• Safety – Eliminates potentially serious drug errors caused by misread handwritten prescriptions, and by medications with names that sound or look similar.
• Convenience – Physicians, pharmacists and their staff members can avoid tedious day-to-day tasks such as keeping track of prescription pads and faxes, pulling and refiling patient charts, and dealing with excessive amounts of paperwork.
• Service – Patients can make fewer trips to the pharmacy, spend less time waiting for their prescriptions to be filled, and enjoy more counseling from those healthcare providers who take advantage of e-prescribing efficiencies.
• Savings – Healthcare providers save money on human resources by eliminating the excessive chart pulls, phone calls, faxes and paperwork that hamper staff productivity.
• Security – Because e-prescriptions travel directly from the prescriber to the pharmacy, there is less potential for fraud and abuse than with paper prescriptions.