Prescription Pad via Shutterstock
When March 27 arrives, all New York doctors will be required to switch from paper to electronic prescriptions, making the Empire State the first in the nation to make the move and say goodbye to the physician-scribbling tradition of providing medication.
But with little less than 30 days remaining before the measure goes into effect – and with no additional extension of the deadline in the works – the big question is whether doctors and hospitals will be ready to ditch the desk pad and go digital.
“We’re all moving from living our lives on small pieces of paper to a digital world,” Paul Testa, chief medical information officer at NYU Langone, told the Wall Street Journal.
Part of the 2012 I-STOP Act (Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing), the switch provides “real-time” prescription monitoring for practitioners and pharmacists, as well as improved safeguards for the distribution of specific abuse-prone prescription drugs.
“New York has enacted the most comprehensive system in the nation to protect the public from the devastating consequences of prescription drug abuse,” says the state's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
The I-STOP Act holds healthcare stakeholders responsible for developing public awareness measures regarding pain management and prescription drugs. It also requires that the Department of Health “establish a safe disposal program for unused medications.”
According to the CDC, nearly 15,000 people overdose and die from prescription painkillers each year. About 70 percent of abusers get their painkillers through friends or relatives who have the actual prescriptions.
This prescription mandate began as a voluntary reporting system to track and curb this prescription drug abuse, according to Assemblyman Michael Cusick, a New York City Democrat who sponsored the bill.
But Cusick and others soon realized such a lax system didn’t work. After seeing a quadruple homicide at a Long Island pharmacy in 2011, as well as an opioid epidemic on the city's borough of Staten Island, they soon realized that “the monitoring system was in place but doctors weren’t using it.”
Between 1999 and 2010, sales of opioid painkillers quadrupled nationally. In that last year so many opioids were being prescribed, that it terms of sheer volume, it was the equivalent of every American adult medicating him- or herself with 5 mg of hydrocodone six times a day for a month.
In response, in 2012 legislators created the I-STOP Act, forcing doctors to use a mandatory system. But, according to Surescript data, only about 12 percent of New York healthcare providers had prepared for e-prescribing by the original March 27, 2015 deadline. Thus, legislators delayed the deadline until the 27th of this month.
But even with the added year, some hospitals – including Montefiore Health System, Northwell Health, NYU Langone Medical Center and Mount Sinai Health System – still need time to comply. They're citing technological snags and added costs of adding the service.
“We see patients who have been referred, because they said, ‘My doctor said they’re not going to write these medicines any more because they can’t e-prescribe,'” Robert Iadevaio, doctor at the Pain Management Center of Long Island, told the Journal.
Also, doctors have pointed out that the new system requires patients to choose a pharmacy when they’re prescribed the drug. This means that if the patient's initial choice doesn’t have the drug, the doctor must fill out another prescription for another pharmacy. The process also prevents patients from shopping around for the lowest prices.