The widespread use of electronic systems to send prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies promises to prevent thousands of life-threatening medical errors, save billions of dollars in health care costs and even drive more business to drug stores.
Still, the vast majority of U.S. physicians have yet to adopt electronic prescribing, or e-prescribing, for the estimated 4 billion prescriptions they write annually, a situation that a phalanx of corporations and the government are working to change. One coalition promoting e-prescribing estimates that as many as 20 percent of the 550,000 practicing U.S. physicians had the technology to send e-prescriptions, but that only 5 percent actually have been using it.
