A very interesting article appeared in Pharmacy Daily in mid January. Two paragraphs especially caught my attention.
Pharmacy Daily Monday 18th January 2010
eRx welcomes funds
.....
eRx has also confirmed that it will continue to provide a free e-prescription service to eRx users via the current Guild funding for 10.6 million transactions and AFSPA funding for 500,000 membership transactions.
More than 3700 pharmacies, general practitioners and medical specialists have registered to use eRx since its Apr 09 launch, with 7.5 million electronic prescriptions already sent to the exchange, of which 1.7m have been dispensed.
.....
The full issue is downloadable from here:
A few things struck me.
The first thing that struck me was that the penetration of registration for the service has clearly reached a real ‘critical mass’
The second was that the ‘free use’ of the system was soon going to run out.
I was also rather confused by the huge number of prescriptions that had been sent to the exchange (7.5M) and that only 23% of those had been dispensed.
What on earth is going on here? Surely more than that proportion or patients actually go and get their medicine from the chemist?
Is it that people are turning up to pharmacies who are not connected to eRx?
Or is it that the meaning of the barcode on the prescription is not being recognised and used for what it is.
I think it would be very interesting to know what is actually happening that these figures are reached. It would be also interesting to know what happens after the prescriptions expire. Right now seems a lot of unloved prescriptions are sloshing around eRx.
Clearly we will need to get the linkage between prescriber, pharmacist and patient working better than this at some point in the future!
David.
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