Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois hits e-Rx milestone
CHICAGO Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois announced Monday that physicians and healthcare providers in the Illinois E-Prescribing Collaborative reached a major milestone in their e-prescribing efforts: the one millionth e-prescription transmitted. The Illinois Blues program also recorded the significant benefits of expanded use of electronic prescribing technology.
“E-prescribing enhances patient care and prevents errors,” said Scott Sarran, M.D., BCBSIL’s chief medical officer. “E-prescribing reduces the potential for drug interactions, which can be extremely harmful, and even fatal in some cases, and it can eliminate the potential for errors that can occur if pharmacists can’t read hand-written prescriptions.”
Sarran said that since BCBSIL launched the e-prescribing program in April 2007, more than 119,000 possible drug interactions have been flagged. As a result, nearly 20% of prescriptions were changed or cancelled.
Based on national trends, more than 670,000 prescriptions will be changed and cancelled in 2009, due to drug interaction warnings, and more than 53,600 prescriptions will be changed or cancelled due to drug allergy warnings.
The Institute of Medicine reports that more than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by medication errors and recommends that all prescriptions be written and received electronically by the year 2010, BCBSIL said.
Surescripts, a St. Paul, Minn.-based national electronic prescribing network, said e-prescribing accounts for about 4.5% of all prescribing in the United States. However, since 2007, e-prescribing has more than doubled to 68 million in 2008 from 29 million in 2007.
Sarran said BCBSIL providers using the technology have increased. He has seen growth in the number of scripts routed electronically. According to the 2008 Electronic Prescribing Progress Report, Illinois ranked 21st in the nation for total number of prescriptions routed electronically. In 2007, the state ranked 28th and was 27th in 2006.