Nursing Informatics · Clinical Perspectives · Healthcare Systems
"The United States alone [among wealthy countries] treats health care as a commodity to be
distributed according to the ability to pay rather than a social service to be distributed
according to medical need."
— JAMA (2003), 290, 798
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The Incentive that Works
December 11, 2009 --
The benefits of prescribing electronically ("e-prescribing")
are numerous:
Fewer errors
Fewer avoidable adverse drug events
Decision support
Detection of drug-drug interactions
Improved record-keeping
Faster communication with pharmacies
And so on...
Indeed, e-prescribing is low-hanging fruit; many MDs have
adopted this practice and prescribe this way... But not
for the above reasons.
The true incentive? Money, of course.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)
has implemented a program named MIPPA
(Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008)
giving eligible e-prescribers an incentive payment of
2% of their Medicare Part B charges in 2009 and 2010.
All that quality-of-care stuff?
Do-no-harm stuff?
Nah! It's the green stuff that gets it done!
