Patient safety is up and the costs of poor care coordination are down as providers increase their use of e-prescribing, health information exchange, and medication reconciliation tools, says a new progress report by Surescripts. Hospitals that increase their use of health IT to develop medication history lists are likely to prevent between three and 26 adverse drug events (ADE) per year while reducing avoidable readmissions and saving up to $1.1 million in unnecessary costs.
In 2014, the e-prescribing and health information exchange network handled 6.5 billion transactions between 900,000 providers, 3300 hospitals, and 61,000 pharmacies. The network’s activities include 1.2 billion e-prescriptions, 764 million medication history transactions, and 7.4 million clinical messages.
With connections to 700 different EHR products, Surescripts covers approximately 70 percent of US patient lives, making it one of the most widespread and successful attempts at health data interoperability to date. The organization is a founding member of Carequality, the interoperability “network of networks” championed by Healtheway and Epic Systems, among others.
While it may have started as a way to ensure that prescriptions could be transmitted electronically, the network has branched out into a broader array of interoperability activities that smooth transitions of care, ensure better patient safety, andfoster communities of health information exchange that help providers communicate as patients traverse the continuum of care.
“Connecting the nation’s healthcare system is a monumental task, and while more work is needed to ensure true interoperability nationwide, there is no question that the Surescripts network is more connected than ever before,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer, Surescripts. “Healthcare is evolving and our collective ability to share health information is addressing a major pain point for providers and patients that ultimately saves time and money and improves the quality of care.”
Surescripts’ latest annual report seems to show that the industry’s investment in interoperability is paying off in meaningful ways for patients. Forty-four percent of hospitals have adopted the network’s medication history capabilities, reporting significant financial and patient safety gains.
On average, small hospitals with around 100 beds have seen three fewer adverse drug events each year, 4 prevented readmissions, and more than $110,000 in savings from cutting unnecessary staff hours and reducing services related to coping with issues of patient harm.
Larger hospitals have saved exponentially more by performing improved medications reconciliation and having more data on a patient’s prescription history. Hospitals with approximately 500 beds have slashed more than half a million dollars in unnecessary costs, while the very biggest systems with more than 1000 beds have prevented 26 ADEs, an average of 43 readmissions, cut 33,000 wasted staff hours, and achieved annual savings of more than $1.1 million.
Surescripts has also poured effort into reducing the administrative obstacles involved in prior authorization, often cited as a major time-waster and a barrier to medication adherence. Up to thirty percent of patients stop taking prescribed medications due to the difficulty in obtaining refills when providers and pharmacy benefit companies rely on faxes and phone calls to push a prescription through.
“Prior authorization for prescriptions is something that happens about two to four percent of the time,”explained David Yakimischak, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Medication Network Services at Surescripts to HealthITAnalytics.com in December. “That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you take billions of prescriptions every year, there’s actually quite a bit of prior authorization work that has to go on.”
Pharmacists typically spend around four hours per week dealing with prior authorization requests, the progress report shows, and physicians may have to sacrifice twice as many hours in order to ensure the prescription process is completed for their patients.
In 2014, Surescripts’ electronic prior authorization tool was available to 330,000 physicians, a number that is slated to grow as EHR developers like Epic Systems and NextGen continue to build partnerships that will enable more providers to use the feature.
“Getting the medicine into the hands of patients quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively is such a huge, huge opportunity in healthcare, but prior authorization is viewed as one of the stumbling blocks,” Yakimischak said. “If you can get more through the system and you get more medicine into the hands of patients that are more compliant with their medication, they’re going to have fewer hospital admissions, fewer emergency room visits, less extensive impact to their health, to society, to their jobs, to their families.”
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