ePrescribing Integration Made Easy!

About Bear River Mental Health: Bear River Mental Health (BRMH) began providing mental health services in January 1977 and became the first free-standing, private not-for-profit comprehensive entity in the state of Utah. BRMH has been providing quality mental health treatment for over three decades and currently serves over 2,000 residents annually.

Bear River Mental Health’s ePrescribing Timeline:

Customer Testimonial: “DoseSpot was a perfect fit for our electronic prescription requirements. The DoseSpot team has been great to work with, very helpful and responsive. The integration of their solution into our system was quick and simple, and I have been very pleased with the process overall.”

- Thad Hunsaker, BRMH Software Development

Medication Allergies: Easily send medication allergies back and forth between your EHR & DoseSpot.  Below is some sample code from our API Guide for all the techies out there.

Wolters Kluwer Health Announces Lexicomp and DoseSpot Partnership to Offer an Integrated ePrescribing Solution for Dental Professionals..http://bit.ly/z254xe

Empower Systems Achieves Full Surescripts Certification Through DoseSpot..http://bit.ly/w1SbKB

]]> http://www.eprescribing.org/dosespot-january-newsletter/feed/ 0 http://www.eprescribing.org/dental-eprescribing-is-officially-open/ http://www.eprescribing.org/dental-eprescribing-is-officially-open/#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:53:52 +0000 Greg http://www.eprescribing.org/?p=141 Today, Wolters Kluwer Health officially announced the Lexicomp and DoseSpot Partnership to Offer the Industry’s First Integrated ePrescribing Solution for Dental Professionals.

Please visit dentaleprescribing.com for more information!

Wolters Kluwer Health

Lexicomp and DoseSpot Partner to

Offer Industry’s First Integrated ePrescribing Solution for Dental Professionals

HUDSON, OH–January 20, 2012 – Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information for healthcare professionals and students, announced today that Lexicomp has partnered with DoseSpot to deliver an integrated eprescribing tool for the dental office. In response to the growing trend of electronic prescribing in dental offices, this product offering combines eprescribing capabilities with direct access to Lexicomp Online for Dentistry™, Lexicomp’s dental-specific drug and clinical information solution, to deliver the information that dental professionals need to safely and efficiently prescribe medication and check for dangerous drug interactions.  “We are very pleased to offer this first-of-its kind combined dental eprescribing and medication management tool to dental professionals”, commented Steven Kerscher, Vice President and General Manager, Lexicomp. “Dental professionals are now able to review their patient’s saved medication history and receive patient safety alerts regarding drug interactions, drug allergies and procedure safety checks for dental treatment.  Having these capabilities, in addition to electronic prescriptions, will save dentists valuable time and help avoid adverse medication events.”

About Lexicomp

Lexicomp is the leader in delivering dental-specific drug information, drug interaction and clinical content for use at the point-of-care. Dental professionals can access their dental drug information and clinical references online, on the latest Smartphone/mobile devices and in printed reference books. Content can also be integrated with practice management systems to improve medication safety and save time within a busy dental practice.

Lexicomp is part of Wolters Kluwer Health, a leading global provider of information, business intelligence and point-of-care solutions for the healthcare industry. Wolters Kluwer Health is part of Wolters Kluwer, a market-leading global information services company with 2010 annual revenues of €3.6 billion ($4.7 billion).

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The only way for your customers to qualify for the Meaningful Use Incentive Program is if your application is Meaningful Use Certified through an organization such as CCHIT or Drummond.  It is also a great marketing tool for your company!

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO RECEIVE MEANINGFUL USE CERTIFICATION?

Same criteria as listed below for Surescripts certification.

DO YOU NEED SURESCRIPTS CERTIFICATION TO RECEIVE MEANINGFUL USE CERTIFICATION?

Your company can choose to go through Meaningful Use certification before Surescripts certification and you will still achieve the Meaningful Use certification for marketing purposes.  However, you will need SureScripts Certification to “go live” with a Meaningful Use certified version.

In order to electronically route prescriptions and search patient specific eligibility, formulary, and medication history, your application must achieve Surescripts certification.  Even when integrating with a Surescripts certified vendor such as DoseSpot, Surescripts still requires a quick certification meeting to “go live”.

WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO IN ORDER TO ACHIEVE SURESCRIPTS CERTIFICATION?

When using DoseSpot, your application will have to pass a quick screen demo test that includes different validation scenarios and the ability to send Surescripts messages appropriately in the backend.

WHAT’S THE MINIMUM FUNCTIONALITY THAT YOU NEED TO PASS?

If you are using DoseSpot’s e-prescribing application, the minimum functionality to pass Surescripts certification is the following:

- Method to pop the DoseSpot application in a browser from your application (using credentials & passing your patient information) and receive the DoseSpotPatientID back from DoseSpot.

- Prescribe within DoseSpot (nothing you need to do here)

- Use the DoseSpot API to check for refill requests and transmission errors in DoseSpot and provide a link within your software to DoseSpot for fulfillment.

- Appropriately validate a patient’s demographic information before sending it to DoseSpot

The advantages for adopting ePrescribing are vast:

Patient Safety

The electronic prescription reduces prescriptions errors caused by illegible hand writing, drug-to-drug interactions, incorrect dosing, drug allergy reactions, duplication of drugs, etc.

Fraud and Crime

The medication history his saved electronically and can be monitored easier than paper.

Medication Adherence

Patients are more likely to fill prescriptions as they’ll be waiting at the pharmacy for pickup.  The refill process is also expedited without multiple phone calls between patient, provider, and pharmacy.

Real-time communication

Providers can write notes that follow the prescription to the pharmacist. Pharmacists can submit refill request on behalf of the patient for approval by the physician (no phone call needed).

Decision Support

Health care professionals will have critical drug alerts and patient specific information at the time of prescribing.

Government Regulations

In January 2011, the state of Minnesota released a mandate for all Prescribing Providers to electronically prescribe medications.  This mandate includes dentists.  The rule wasn’t put in place to punish dentists.  It was actually designed to bring dentist into the fold of sharing health information.

Most dental Practice Management Systems don’t have electronic prescribing capabilities.  In the next few years a number of these companies will begin adding ePrescribing capabilities.  A company called DoseSpot has developed a dental e-prescribing application accessible from the web.  The dental industry is about change the way it prescribes medications.  Stay tuned…

The reality is that any transactions between your system and the pharmacy system will be handled by a third party delivery service.  This service company is Surescripts RxHub.  Some may be familiar with the history of the company, but for those not, in a nutshell they used to be two companies serving two very different user bases.  Surescripts worked with the retail pharmacies, while Rx Hub worked with the Pharmacy Benefit Managers (in other words, the insurers).   I’m sure Surescripts RxNorm are working towards a unified system, but until then you can still think of Surescripts RxHub as two different systems.

Implementing ePrescribing for the first time will be a lot of development work, so if you wanted to stage the development over time and get more bang for your buck it may be a good idea to start with one group rather than the whole kit and caboodle.

Fortunately, taking a look at the following CCHIT requirements makes this first decision pretty easy:

As you can see, CCHIT tries not to be partial for either group in the last two requirements but the simple truth is that the first requirement really points towards implementing a solution through the PBMs. Determining, the eligibility of drug insurance is definitely not a function of a pharmacy; and even if it was wouldn’t it be more efficient to go straight to the source – the insurer?

Stay Tuned

I started this post stating we’re really trying to just get a prescription from your existing EHR into the hands of the fulfiller.  Now, we’re talking about first getting not only the patient’s eligibility information but also changing your EHR to provide formulary information.  If that wasn’t enough, you’ll also be adding a view into the patient’s medication history.  In my next post, I plan on going into more detail just what all of this means and the things you should think about when you’re ready to implement this functionality.

I started by going to CCHIT and downloaded the final CCHIT Certified 08 Ambulatory EHR criteria and test scripts.  I then used the excel spreadsheet(CCHITCriteriaAMBULATORY08FINAL.xls)  and filtered by category “9. Medications / ePrescribing”.  For the sake of providing a foundational view of ePrescribing, I then further filtered my results to only include the 2008 provisions.  The list contained requirements that The table below illustrates my results:

I was initially confused by the first two entries.  It makes sense that EHRs be able to handle incoming and generate codified Allergy and Conditions to help in safely ordering medications, but I want to focus strictly on ordering the medication in my EHR and getting that prescription to the pharmacy electronically.  The Continuity of Care Document (CCD) is a subject worthy of its own series of posts.

Once I remove the CCD requirements, there are really only five requirements to satisfy in order to claim victory for the 2008 requirement set.  It may seem simple enough, but to satisfy these requirements you will find that the ordering system your granddaddy used (from paper to even existing electronic ordering) will need to be changed considerably.

Stay Tuned

Now that we’ve looked at all that is required to be a qualified e-prescribing system in 2008 according to CCHIT, I plan on detailing what exactly this entails per requirement.  Eventually, I plan on catching us up to the present year by doing the same with the 2009 requirements.  After that, get your flux capacitors fluxing and we’ll even check out what the future holds for us (2010 and beyond).

• E-prescribing makes sure that the prescriber is providing enough specific information for the pharmacist to fill the prescription, including the name of the drug, the dosage, its physical form, the route, and the physician’s instructions.
• Electronic prescribing software eliminates the time and effort of trying to understand the prescriber’s handwriting, as well as the chance of an error in that translation.
• E-prescribing significantly reduces the chance that the prescriber’s intentions are misinterpreted.
• E-prescribing is often used in conjuction with clinical decision support to ensure that any drug to drug interactions or drug to diagnosis issues are found and reported to the physician before the prescription order is completed.

Electronic prescribing is considered one of the most important areas of Healthcare IT, which is why Medicare created payment incentives for physicians who use a qualified e-prescribing system. In 2009, the incentives are an increase of 2% in revenue for each patient when e-prescribing is used. Due to the 2009 HITECH Act, electronic prescribing is required as part of any EMR (EHR) which qualifies for Medicare reimbursement in 2011.