Dive Brief:
- More than 1 billion prescriptions were sent to pharmacists electronically in 2013, up from 788 million the previous year, according to a Surescripts annual study.
- Surescripts itself routed 58% of the prescriptions sent, including 73% of those written by office-based physicians, the company said an announcement.
- Meanwhile, the study's Safe-Rx Rankings, which measure states' progress in adopting e-prescribing, put Delaware at the top of the list, with 81% of Delaware physicians sending 3.8 million e-prescriptions last year.
Dive Insight:
The growth in e-prescribing brings the US closer to realizing its full benefits. According to research published in Perspectives in Health Information Management, sending prescriptions electronically to pharmacies could potentially save the US health care system an estimated $27 billion per year, and help avoid more than two million adverse drug events annually. But the cost of implementation remains one of the biggest barriers to universal e-prescription adoption in ambulatory practices, the study notes.