Physicians who primarily issue prescriptions electronically have lower rates of adverse drug events (ADEs) among their patients with diabetes, according to an AHRQ study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The study used 2011 Medicare Part D drug claims data, representing nearly 28 million Medicare beneficiaries, to investigate ADE rates of physicians who used e-prescribing for 50 percent or more of prescriptions (and therefore met the CMS meaningful use stage 2 threshold for e-prescribing). Those physicians were compared with physicians who prescribed primarily in writing, by telephone or in other ways. Of nearly 130,000 physicians included in the study, 25 percent were considered high e-prescribers because they met the meaningful use threshold in 2011. Five percent of high e-prescribers had at least one patient with an ADE, compared with 6.5 percent of low e-prescribers. High e-prescribing was associated with a reduced risk of hospital or emergency department visits for hypoglycemia or ADEs related to anti-diabetes medications.
Read study: “Meaningful Use Stage 2 E-Prescribing Threshold and Adverse Drug Events in the Medicare Part D Population With Diabetes,”, May 6 2015. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association
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