Online Prescription Writing can save money and lives

I was reading an article recently that spoke of the digital divide in a different way. It is sort of the older versus younger, but in a medical vein. While many see different sides to age and wisdom over youth and exuberance, there can be other factors in your health care. That being said, what is the value of the written prescription? Is it some bed side activity that makes us psychologically feel better when we leave the doctors with our “prescription for healing” in our hands and find value there? I don't personally think so, but often times, a kind word and attention goes a long way in healing.

It seems that the old guard physicians are not so keen on abandoning the written prescriptions. As we all know poor handwriting is a problem that causes many problems. We have all seen them, and tried to decipher them, when the pharmacist asks what “what does this say.” And we both try to read hieroglyphics, and see if our addled memory can strain to remember the name of the medication we were told to get.

Doctors have been seeing rising costs as they have been asked to start doing their prescription writing on line. With health care costs rising, and hopefully coming to the attention of the new president and congress, maybe will finally do something about it. It seems pretty simple to me that an online based program would be relatively simple and cheap,cheap as compared to the cost of healthcare.

It will be nice when we can one day take all our medical records on a chip, the size of a matchbook, that has all of our charts and x-rays, and lab work, in one place. I would foresee this coming in the next 20 years, hopefully sooner. There will be privacy and ethics issues as I am sure some other constraints, but that should be maintained on a national government internet based records system. Problem is, the government does not do computers well, so maybe some quasi- public private entity would be a likely solution.

The younger doctors embrace technology readily, as do most younger people. The majority of the large pharmacies accept electronic prescriptions, but only 6% of the physicians own the software, SureScripts, which is too low for corporate America. The companies that provide health insurance are looking to cut costs and figure this is one way to do so, and cut down on liability and problems, while increasing the speed of the prescriptions. The doctors here in Santa Cruz will prescribe to wherever you tell them to, but most will hand you the prescription or fax it.

One of the largest medicine providers, known for low costs, Walmart, is leading the charge followed by other huge firms such as Ford, and Verizon.It is estimated that electronic prescription will save $29 billion dollars over the next 10 years. One of the big costs that doctors face in addition to medical school is front office personnel to administer all the health care industry and government forms. Next time you are at a doctors office, see how many front office workers there are, that doctor must support in order to handle all the paper work. I would guess for most offices, that there is a minimum of 2 or 3, and these people aren’t minimum wage workers.

When doctors can go online, they can quickly and easily choose from a range of choices, and prices, and that will lead to better pricing as the doctor will have all the information at his or her fingertips. While is not uncommon for doctors to go online to review incidence rates and improved treatment procedures, we can arm ourselves with medical resources such as Healthfinder or WebMD.

The more information you have going in, the better questions you can ask your doctor. Speaking of health, the Santa Cruz Real Estate market is sick, but not dead. If you want a check up for your home or an investment, contact me at 831-818-7524.

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About the author. Gregg Camp is a seniors real estate specialist( SRES) and has lived in the Santa Cruz area for 30 years. He has worked in the real estate field for 20 years and has interests in the healthcare field, in part, due to the impact it has on his older clients.