5 obstacles to e-prescribing: 5 approaches to overcoming them

While they've been around for years, online prescriptions are still a long way from replacing the written pad. Physicians and others tell how to change that.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 12, 2003.

Edward Zabrek, MD, is such a believer in electronic prescribing that he chose to pay for a new system after the company providing his old one for free went bankrupt. "I chose to pay because I had used an e-prescribing system before, liked it and didn't want to live without it," said Dr. Zabrek, a solo obstetrician-gynecologist in Houston.

But most physicians aren't as enthusiastic about e-prescribing, in which a medication order is transmitted from the physician's computer to a pharmacy computer, rather than written on a pad and handed to the patient. Although ambulatory e-prescribing technology has been around since the late 1990s, only a fraction of physicians are using it.

Several technology-savvy physicians interviewed by American Medical News identified five key reasons why it will be years before most doctors adopt e-prescribing:

Obstacle 1: Physicians can't afford the technology.