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Tuesday August 23, 2022

Leverage Your Hospital EHR to Reduce Medication Dispensing Errors

Every year, hundreds of thousands of patients experience an adverse reaction or health complication resulting from prescription errors.

But with the rise of electronic prescribing, healthcare providers are now in a position to enhance how doctors and pharmacists deliver pharmacological therapy, improve patient outcomes, and lower expenses across the industry.

Through our collaboration with Surescripts, MEDHOST is committed to enhancing the accuracy of e-prescriptions for the benefit of physicians, pharmacists, and patients.

Enhancing e-Prescription Practices

Nearly two billion e-prescriptions pass through the Surescripts network annually.

Each is assessed for accuracy and given additional support through quality benchmarks and continuous reporting. Health systems, retailers, mail-order pharmacies, and electronic health records (EHR) companies like MEDHOST can use these indicators to identify issue areas and implement fixes based on actionable intelligence.

Greater Accuracy

There are more than 800 distinct ways to write "take one tablet by mouth two times daily," which means there are hundreds of ways to confuse a patient and cause an incorrect dosage. For pharmacists, the variety of pharmaceutical delivery methods, such as tablets, pills, and packages, make it possible to prescribe the right medication in the wrong potency.

By delivering clear instructions, Surescripts ensures a quicker and more accurate treatment process.

For instance, standardizing language (Structured and Codified Sig) aids patients with easy-to-read directions that are free of medical abbreviations or jargon, while appropriate Potency Unit Code (PUC) aids pharmacists in understanding prescriber intent.

Additionally, mismatched drug descriptions and IDs, such as National Drug Code (NDC) and RxNorm, can result in significant patient safety concerns. Using Surescripts’s ability to identify these differences, MEDHOST can upgrade pharmacy systems so that drug descriptions and NDC identifiers match, ensuring the proper alerts are triggered if a medication error occurs.

Less Administrative Burden

By enabling prescribers to replace or change prescriptions from within the MEDHOST EHR workflow, Surescripts also helps decrease administrative hassles and improve operational efficiency.

To streamline communication with prescribers, pharmacists can now electronically request changes to prescriptions within their workflow, while EPCS (Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances) guarantees that all prescriptions, including those for opioids, follow a single, effective e-prescribing procedure.

Best of all, the need for phone calls or faxes is eliminated thanks to Surescripts's accurate and up-to-date directory data feed to MEDHOST.

A Dedicated Partner

For many years, Surescripts has concentrated on filling prescriptions in a reliable, safe, and efficient manner.

To improve patient care by increasing the accuracy and efficiency of e-prescribing, MEDHOST and Surescripts's relationship helps bring together the expertise of hundreds of people from EHR vendors, pharmacies, pharmacy benefits managers, health systems, and drug companies.

Please contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or dial 1.800.383.6278 to find out how e-prescribing might increase prescription accuracy and medication adherence rates at your facility.

About Surescripts

Surescripts’s purpose is to serve the nation with the single most trusted and capable health information network, built to increase patient safety, lower costs and ensure quality care. Since 2001, Surescripts has led the movement to turn data into actionable intelligence and convened the Surescripts Network Alliance® to enhance prescribing, inform care decisions and advance the healthcare industry.

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