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Electronic
Links Aim
to Reduce Drug Errors
NEW
YORK (Reuters Health) - Three of the nation's largest pharmacy
benefit management companies on Thursday announced an unprecedented
$60-million joint venture to develop an electronic exchange linking
the companies with doctors, pharmacies and health plans.
Pharmacy benefit
management (PBM) companies help organizations deliver prescription
drugs to health plan members in a cost effective manner.
The venture,
called RxHub, provides a single channel for communication between
doctors, pharmacies, PBMs and health plans.
The idea is
to improve prescription-writing and drug-dispensing accuracy and
efficiency, enhance safety and convenience for patients, and reduce
employer and health plan costs.
The three
founding partners--AdvancePCS, Express Scripts and Merck-Medco--collectively
provide drug coverage for a majority of Americans, accounting
for 1 billion prescriptions per year.
``Each of
the companies had independently identified a need in the current
prescription process,'' according to a statement released by RxHub.
``After pursuing solutions individually, the companies determined
that founding this joint venture is the best and most efficient
way to accelerate the development of an industry-wide solution.''
Ultimately,
they said, all of the 500,000 community-based doctors in the US
could benefit from the system, which would make it easier to write
and transmit prescriptions, reducing the need for phone calls
between pharmacies and doctors' offices. Consumers would benefit,
too, from a reduced potential for errors and speeding up receipt
of their medications.
Those efficiencies
should also save staff time and costs, the companies said.
Each founding
partner has agreed to invest up to $20 million over the next 5
years, including about $6 million this year, and will own one
third of the new company, according to a statement released by
the St. Louis-based Express Scripts. RxHub is not intended to
be a profit-making entity, the companies said.
PBMs would
be to able to alert physicians of potential interactions between
drugs they plan to prescribe and other medications a patient is
taking. Electronic prescribing technology also should cut down
on potential errors stemming from doctors' sloppy handwriting.
The proposed
system responds to a problem highlighted in a landmark report
from the Institute of Medicine, which documented serious medical
errors in the US health care system. Errors involving prescription
medications kill up to 7,000 Americans a year, and drug-related
morbidity and mortality may exceed $77 billion annually, the 1999
report showed. The companies cited a more recent study showing
that errors stemming from misinterpreted handwritten prescriptions
are the second-most prevalent and costly mistake, factoring into
90,000 malpractice claims filed over a recent 7-year period.
Through RxHub,
the companies also hope to cut through the clutter of the more
than 50 electronic prescription-writing systems that exist today
and encourage broad adoption by physicians. Moving a single platform,
they believe, will help ''jump-start'' that effort, easing the
way for doctors to determine what coverage a patient has and to
electronically route prescriptions to the patient's pharmacy.
RxHub will
work with standards-setting organizations such as the National
Council for Prescription Drug Programs to develop universal electronic
prescribing standards, the partners said. It also intends to ``actively
solicit participation'' from every participant in the health care
delivery chain to broaden the system's reach.
Reference
Source 89
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