Advantages And Disadvantages Of E-Prescribing System

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Since various e-prescribing systems have various draw backs, the most effective system suitable for a given healthcare facility should always be chosen. There are two choices which should be considered when choosing an e-prescribing system. We have either a standalone system or an e-prescribing system within an electronic health record (HER) system. Each option has merits and demerits in terms of cost, efforts and time needed to implement, effects on practice workflow and productivity, and whether it can operate with other electronic health information systems. Hence various features of the system to be used should be considered and weighed from a short term and longer range perspective as this will help in the selection of the best choice which will meet a given healthcare facility practice’s needs (Grossman et al. 395).
A stand-alone system is cheaper and easy to implement than e-prescribing system with an EHR system. E-prescribing systems store and organize patient data specific to the prescribing process such as medication history. E-prescribing software may be provided in two forms: a package which one acquires and downloads to office computer system or a program obtained via the internet which is connected to an e-prescribing application hosted by a service provider who may demand some fees for the service. In terms of the hardware to use to host the given e-prescribing system, healthcare workers may have various choices such as use of handheld devices, tablets, laptops, desktop computers besides other relevant hardware provided by the technology vendors. Most people believe that a stand-alone e-prescribing system serves as a gateway to an EHR system and allows health workers using it to be...

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...issues. Such issues should be resolved early enough at the implementation planning stage (Schade et al. 475).
Planning should involve the ideas of clinicians and IT personnel in the assessment of technology choices of health management systems available. Permanent sites for system testing and training are necessary. These environments are precisely similar to the environment where the system will be applied. Initial test environment should allow testing of modified configurations before the launch of the live system. Any modifications which do not pass user acceptance testing and system testing in the test environment should not be incorporated into the live system. In addition, the training environment should also be similar to the real system working conditions and should be always available for access by the health management system users (Schade et al. 474).

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