With e-prescribing, U.S. doctors pick cheaper drugs

WASHINGTON, USA: Doctors who put aside their paper pads and prescribe medicines electronically may be more likely to choose lower-cost drugs, saving money for patients and insurers, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Only about 6 per cent of U.S. doctors use ‘e-prescribing’ even though doing so may improve efficiency and reduce errors such as a pharmacy misreading a doctor's sloppy handwriting or dispensing a different drug with a similar name.

Dr. Michael Fischer of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues detailed another e-prescribing benefit: encouraging doctors to choose cheaper drugs.

The researchers evaluated a program in Massachusetts in which two large insurers worked with a maker of e-prescribing systems, Zix Corp, to get doctors to use one that employed simple color coding to identify prescription medication, whether name-brand or generic, by price level.

Insurers use a three-tiered system regarding drug costs.

In the year after adopting this e-prescribing system, the doctors increased their use of tier 1 prescriptions -- those with the lowest cost -- by 3.3 percent, while prescriptions for the more expensive drugs declined, the researchers wrote in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

That translates to a savings for consumers and insurers of $845,000 per 100,000 patients per year. In a country of 300 million people, such savings could be substantial.

"When you use an electronic prescribing system to give physicians information on which drugs are less expensive for their patients at the point of prescribing -- right when they're making that decision -- they're going to choose medications that are more affordable for their patients," Fischer said in a telephone interview.

The rising cost of prescription drugs accounts for a big chunk of overall medical spending as U.S. policymakers are looking for ways to make the health care system cost less and deliver better results.