You either need to be a doctor yourself or a pharmacist to actually understand what your doctor has prescribed for you, we’ve all faced problems trying to decipher our prescriptions, and New York is finally doing something that’s going to make it easier. It’s moving to digital prescriptions and the benefits of this move are more than just making it easy for you and me to understand our prescriptions.
New York State will be switching from paper to electronic prescriptions on March 27th. The move is part of the I-Stop law passed in 2012 that aims to reduce deaths caused by prescription medication addiction.
Handwritten prescriptions are not only hard to understand for patients but they’re also easily forged or changed. Attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman describes them as a form of “criminal currency” that can be traded more easily than the drugs themselves.
Moving to an electronic prescription system will hopefully reduce the incidence of such criminal acts and also reduce errors resulting from misinterpretation of handwriting on legitimate prescriptions.
Patients will first have to select a pharmacy where their prescription will be sent, they can pick a pharmacy from a list in a software, and there’s relaxation in the law that allows doctors to jot down prescriptions if there’s are technical problems with the system. Physicians don’t have the option to sign up for this program, those who don’t can be fined or even jailed.
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