The healthcare industry is a paradox for the tech community; it stands to significantly benefit from upgraded technology, because its legacy systems are ineffective, costly, and potentially dangerous. However, mountains of HIPAA red tape, security liability concerns, and abuse of the healthcare system – both by patients and insurers – make upgrading the technology a logistical nightmare.
Luckily, companies are wading into that logistical quagmire. AdvancedMD, a company that provides cloud services for physician practices, has just released the latest enterprise solution for healthcare professionals. AdvancedEPCS, the new product, is an ePrescribing service that “meets strict regulatory requirements for DEA class II-V narcotics.” The service is poised to revamp the way physicians prescribe one of the most abused, but necessary, drugs on the market.
Electronic prescriptions are, to many physicians, the future of practicing medicine. They build patient profiles, which help doctors notice patterns and problems in a patient’s prescription history. Those profiles help identify problem patients, including drug-seeking patients and patients who may not be fit to remember their prescription history.
In addition, electronic prescriptions are increasingly safer than the traditional pen-and-paper prescription pad. An electronic login is much more difficult to steal than a notebook, and it’s much more difficult to forge an electronic signature.
AdvancedEPCS regulates the prescription process through two channels: 1) it secures the process by requiring two-factor authentication before allowing drugs to be prescribed, and 2) it audits and cross-references the prescribed drug and the patient, giving both a list of previous prescriptions and potential drug interactions.
Those two channels address the biggest concerns of healthcare tech companies: security and patient care. AdvancedEPCS will pair with the AdvancedMD cloud platform for independent physicians, and hopefully change the face of practicing MD’s across the nation.
"My practice is now able to electronically prescribe 80-90 percent of our prescriptions. It is easy and there is no extra work involved," said Dr. Guy Lerner, Specialists in Pain Care, Louisville, Kentucky. "In addition, it allows me to conveniently prescribe schedule 2 drugs while eliminating security concerns. There are no paper scripts to lose, and we can easily track the prescriptions at the pharmacy."
Those schedule 2 drugs that Dr. Lerner mentioned are a driving factor of this new product. The medical community is waiting on stricter deployment guidelines for those drugs, part of the CDC’s commitment to more heavily regulate opiates in the public sphere.
AdvancedEPCS and other e-Prescription services may begin to bank the tide of opiate use. At the very least, they’ll be a necessary and welcome facelift to the outdated medical industry.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
