Dean Riggott Photography
Surescripts
I practiced pharmacy for the first 16 years of my career. There was no e-prescribing when I started out, not to mention electronic prescribing for controlled substances (EPCS). Paper and telephone were all we had. We’ve come a long way: EPCS wasn’t even legal in all 50 states until 2015, but today, most states require it.
Here’s the letter sent to me from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) after the first meeting between the DEA and the healthcare industry to discuss the possibility of allowing EPCS.
The letter is dated March 12, 1998, a few years before Surescripts was founded, when I worked for the National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA), and more than a decade before the very first e-prescription for a controlled substance was sent across the Surescripts network, on August 4, 2011.
