An Online Database for Doctors Can Improve Health Care
An increasing number of Florida doctors embrace health information technology (IT) as a tool to make health care safer, more effective and more efficient.
“If a patient has more than one health provider, and if all of them are using the same electronic health record, everyone’s notes, prescriptions and tests can be shared in a secure database,” explained Dr. Bryan Bognar, a general internist, educator and health IT advocate.
“It doesn’t matter where the patient goes physically because their chart can be accessed anytime, anywhere over an Internet connection.”
Health IT offers many advantages in terms of affordability and safety. Doctors can check health insurance drug prices, compare name-brand drugs with generics and order prescriptions online through retail and mail-order pharmacies. If, for example, a doctor tries to prescribe a drug that interacts poorly with a patient’s other meds, a warning would appear on the computer screen.
Centralizing patient information is a serious issue. According to a 2006 report by the Institute of Medicine, at least 1.5 million Americans are sickened, injured or killed each year by errors in prescribing, dispensing and taking medications.
Experts prescribe IT as a solution. “IT has been shown to reduce some kinds of medical error – such as delivering the wrong medicine or incorrect dose – by as much as 90 percent,” wrote Dr. Bill Novelli, CEO of AARP, in his book 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America.
Do patients welcome this technology? Ask Irene Euchler.
She experienced handwritten prescription errors firsthand while trying to treat an ear infection. “If I had taken the drug as prescribed, it would have killed me,” said Euchler. “Thank God my druggist caught the mistake.” Euchler’s current doctor writes e-prescriptions, and would have seen a warning flash on his screen if he had tried to prescribe the same dose.
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