Vendors Form Group To Pitch E-Prescriptions

With the goal of accelerating the adoption of electronic prescriptions, a group of health IT vendors have joined together to help pitch doctors, payers, and retail pharmacies on the benefits of E-prescribing.

The health-care industry has been talking about electronic prescriptions, but hasn't made significant progress in adoption. "There's been a few false starts, and we decided to take a leadership position and pull together to remove barriers of adoption by physicians and payers, to be a source of education and implementation resources to make it happen," says Donald Gravlin, VP and chief technology officer at Capgemini Health's payer practice and a spokesperson of the new CafeRx coalition.

CafeRx includes Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Capgemini, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs, NDCHealth, RxHub, and SureScripts. New members are welcome, Gravlin says.

Instead of promoting any one product, technology, or service, the group will promote "common standards for interoperability," Gravlin says. The idea is to give payers, doctors, and retail pharmacies a choice of products that fit their workflows and business needs, yet achieve industry-wide interoperability and promote the benefits of E-prescribing. Benefits include a reduction in medical errors caused by illegible handwriting, negative drug interactions and allergies, as well as cost reductions through better compliance to drug formularies and a reduction of paperwork.

Developing E-prescription standards in the health-care industry to promote widespread adoption is also one of the objectives of the federal government's 10-year plan to overhaul the health-care industry through IT.

CafeRx will make available free to doctors, payers, and others information about best practices and successful strategies for implementing E-prescribing processes and technologies. The group also will lobby states and the federal government for new ways that can help push the adoption of E-prescriptions, whether through financial reward incentives or by removing regulatory barriers that hinder E-prescribing and electronic health records, Gravlin says.