Innovating for Impact: Easing Burdens & Increasing Medication Safety

Innovating for impact—it’s what organizations across healthcare want to achieve. But how does this kind of meaningful innovation happen? With a built-in network of stakeholders.

That’s why we continue to prioritize collaboration with industry stakeholders who share the same purpose: to improve healthcare for patients and those who care for them.

It’s one of the benefits of having a built-in network of stakeholders, who together work to provide better quality, safer and less costly care for patients.

And we’ve been working within this kind of collaboration for more than two decades. Our Sig IQ technology is the latest example of innovative technology that has come directly out of this collaboration and built-in network of stakeholders.

Always Innovating

Sig IQ translates free-text patient directions found on every prescription into a quality-controlled, clinically validated format, or Structured & Codified Sig (S&C Sig). The result? The prescriber’s intended course of treatment is protected, and prescriptions are safer for patients.

Surescripts introduced Sig IQ for Medication History in 2022, with a clear purpose of alleviating administrative tasks that slow down the prescribing process, easing the burdens facing prescribers and pharmacists, while at the same time, prioritizing medication safety for patients.

The impact was significant and immediate.

Surescripts Sig IQ showed a meaningful impact on clinical reviews and alleviating potential patient harm – at scale—from the start. For example:

• In 2024, Surescripts has delivered 4.1 billion S&C Sig in Medication History transactions for Sig IQ-enabled customers. This is more than twice as many compared to 2023, which totaled 1.9 billion S&C Sigs returned.
• Sig IQ augmented more than 2 million RxRenewal transactions in the first 6 months following its release in late 2023.

This impact was the driving force to expand the innovative Sig IQ capabilities to support RxRenewal Requests last year. And recently, we’ve expanded Sig IQ to more types of E-Prescribing transactions, including NewRx and RxRenewal Responses.

Innovating With Purpose

It bears repeating that there are 832 ways to convey the most common patient medication direction of ‘take 1 tablet by mouth once daily.” Knowing that, it’s not surprising that there are 1.5 million emergency department visits stemming from adverse drug events each year.

Surescripts Sig IQ technology was developed with the intention of alleviating preventable instances of potential patient harm. Initially, this innovation supported medication history, by helping eliminate uncertainty for clinicians and patients while reducing the administrative work that is often required to verify prescriber intent.

Now, this technology supports more E-Prescribing transactions, meaning a more accurate, safer and efficient process for prescribers and pharmacists – from the start.

It’s a reminder that we’re always innovating and already making an impact, fulfilling our purpose of delivering simpler, trusted health intelligence sharing that continues helping healthcare heal itself.