Pharmacy Interoperability and Pharmacy Perspectives Coming Out of the ONC Annual Meeting

It never ceases to amaze me how integral the role of the pharmacist could be to a patient and how many pharmacists are relegated to counting pills and checking insurance.  I first experienced this in my first healthcare job which included handling IT support for the pharmacy.  Yes, the pharmacist has to make sure the prescription is filled properly and the patient gets the right number of pills.  However, I quickly learned that pharmacists can be some of the best sources of medical information for me as a patient.  Not to mention, they generally more accessible to talk about the medication and how it works than the doctor.  Two decades later, I still remember the medication lessons my pharmacist colleagues taught me.  Patient education is just one example of many where pharmacists could take a more active role in the healthcare system and we could all benefit from pharmacists’ expertise. Another area where we haven’t enabled pharmacists has to do with pharmacy interoperability.  While almost every pharmacy out there now supports ePrescribing, the healthcare industry has fallen short when it comes to ensuring that pharmacists have full access to all of the prescriptions that have been filled for a patient.  This puts patients into the untenable position of filling all their prescriptions at one location which can mean paying more for the same prescriptions or patients filling their prescriptions at multiple locations and the pharmacist doesn’t know ab...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: C-Suite Leadership Clinical EMR-EHR Health IT Company Healthcare IT Hospital - Health System Interoperability Regulations Cam Deemer DrFirst ePrescribing Healthcare Interoperability Healthcare IT Video Interviews Healthcare Scene Source Type: blogs