ePrescribing
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The Basics of ePrescribing

Basics Controlled Substances e-Prescribing 101 e-Prescribing Software EHR EMR EPCS
Updated: June 16, 2024

The healthcare technology landscape continues to evolve, making it hard to keep up. It can feel overwhelming even when you try to isolate specific “jobs to be done” and the tools to get you there. That’s why it’s important to get back to the basics.

Let’s sort through some high-level information regarding ePrescribing and its different components. No need for time-consuming internet searches. Here is your ePrescribing 101 guide.

What is ePrescribing?

The term ePrescribing has become a popular buzzword in the healthcare industry, but what exactly does it mean? To put it simply, electronic prescribing, or ePrescribing, is a method of prescription transaction that allows prescribers to write and send prescriptions to pharmacies electronically instead of writing, phoning in, or faxing them. It ultimately replaces the costly paper prescription pad and tamper-proof printing paper from a provider’s office for good.

Here are a few of its many capabilities:

What are the clinical benefits?

ePrescribing is more than the ability to send prescriptions electronically to pharmacies. It can also increase the quality of care delivered in a number of ways:

What are the Operational benefits?

We can all agree that time is money. Practice management is always looking for workflow efficiencies and ways to innovate processes. ePrescribing can help:

Who can ePrescribe?

State or provincial legislation governs who can write a prescription. Under these rulings, any licensed physician, dentist, nurse practitioner, etc., allowed to write prescriptions by hand can also prescribe electronically.

Many ePrescribing solutions also allow the application of proxy users, such as nurses, medical assistants, or office staff. While they cannot legally send a prescription to a pharmacy, they can access the ePrescribing solution and fill in all required fields for a prescriber to approve and send.

What pharmacies allow ePrescribing?

All 50 states and the District of Columbia allow the ePrescribing of controlled and non-controlled substances, and more than 90% of pharmacies can receive ePrescriptions. Of course, this includes the larger retail pharmacy chains such as CVS, Walgreens, Walmart, and other grocery chains, as well as mail-order pharmacies.

ePrescribing software has many advantages, including saving time, improving patient safety, and providing better tracking to monitor prescribing behavior. It’s time you added it to your practice management tools, so you don’t get left behind.

Check out our Services and Integrations to learn how you can get started with DoseSpot.