Inspiring excellence
Honoring leaders in prescription accuracy for their dedication to improved patient safety and better healthcare for all.
Celebrating leaders in e-prescription accuracy
The Surescripts White Coat AwardTM honors those moving prescription accuracy forward. Whether you’re building more advanced e-prescribing software, awareness among prescribers or better workflows among pharmacists, the White Coat Award celebrates these achievements.
Clear and accurate e-prescriptions benefit physicians, pharmacists and patients alike. They protect patient safety, accelerate time to therapy by eliminating confusion and rework and help ensure patients get the best possible care. Meanwhile, simplifying the prescription process for prescribers and pharmacists can help alleviate burnout.
By receiving public recognition for their prescription accuracy performance, Surescripts White Coat Award winners prove that they are achieving measurable results. They instill pride in their employees and confidence in their patients and other stakeholders. They also inspire other healthcare organizations to strive for prescription accuracy gains of their own, moving the entire healthcare industry forward.
Organizations eligible for a White Coat Award include:
EHR vendors
We honor EHR vendors enhancing their e-prescribing software.
Health systems
We shine a light on health systems working to advance prescription accuracy and patient safety.
Pharmacies & pharmacy technology vendors
We celebrate pharmacies and pharmacy technology vendors making the prescriptions they process clearer, safer and less likely to need intervention.
How can you win? Stay in touch.
Your Surescripts Account Manager can provide progress reports and insight into how to improve your Quality Index Score (QIS). Partnering with your account manager can ensure you understand how your QIS is calculated and targeted improvements to make.
How can you win? Take a gradual approach.
The National Council for Prescription Drug Programs (NCPDP) has identified 24 Sig concepts that account for 40–60% of e-prescription volume. Start with these Structured & Codified Sigs and roll out a few each month.
How can you win? Make it match.
Appropriate use of the drug description field is critical to improving your QIS. Work closely with your compendia partner to ensure that drug descriptions and e-prescribing preferred names (EPN) match.
How can you win? Prepare end users to make the most of new transactions.
Enabling RxChange is an important first step, but make sure to devote just as much attention to training end users and ensuring it's integrated at a logical place in their workflows.
Award categories
With three award categories, the Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes overall excellence in prescription accuracy as well as adoption of technology that improves patient safety and healthcare delivery.
Highest accuracy
The highest accuracy award recognizes the best overall accuracy score as measured by Surescripts Sentinel®, a data analysis engine that monitors the accuracy of e-prescriptions and pinpoints areas for improvement.
Structured & codified sig champion
The structured & codified sig champion award recognizes organizations making the best use of this important e-prescription field, which streamlines prescribing and dispensing while reducing opportunity for errors.
RxChange champion
The RxChange champion award highlights organizations successfully advancing the RxChange transaction, which lets pharmacies communicate with prescribers to resolve prescription concerns within their electronic workflow.
Eligibility & competition tiers
Organizations of all sizes have a role to play in advancing prescription accuracy. Each organization will only be directly competing with other organizations in the same tier.
EHR vendors that contract directly with Surescripts, serve multiple provider groups and use approved compendia
- Tier 1: More than 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: Up to 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
Health systems that contract directly with Surescripts
- Tier 1: More than 180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: 70,001–180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 3: Up to 70,000 monthly NewRx transactions
Pharmacy tech vendors, retail pharmacies and mail-order pharmacies that contract directly with Surescripts and maintain their own pharmacy software
- Tier 1: More than 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 2: 10,001–500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 3: Up to 10,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
Questions about your eligibility? Contact your Surescripts Account Manager.
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Highest accuracy
The highest accuracy award recognizes the best overall accuracy score, as measured by the Surescripts Sentinel® e-prescription accuracy engine.
Surescripts Network Alliance participants have collectively improved the network-wide QIS for e-prescriptions by more than 80% since 2016.
Highest accuracy tips
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Stay in touch
Past winners have had a close relationship with their Surescripts Account Manager, who can provide progress reports and insight into how to improve your QIS. Having regular contact with your account manager can ensure you understand the scope of the criteria and how you can make improvements.
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Ensure drug descriptions match
Drug description is critical to improving your QIS. Past winners have worked closely with their compendia partner to ensure that their drug description matches their e-prescribing preferred name.
Structured & codified sig champion
The structured & codified sig champion award recognizes organizations making the best use of the Structured & Codified Sig fields. This important e-prescription field standardizes directions for medication use, which streamlines prescribing and dispensing while reducing the opportunity for errors.
One pharmacy reported that e-prescriptions with Structured and Codified Sig language reduced time to fill by 33%.
EHR adoption of Structured & Codified Sig doubled in 2020.
Structured & codified sig champion tips
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Take a gradual approach.
NCPDP has identified 24 Sig concepts that account for 40–60% of e-prescription volume. Start with these Sigs, rolling out a few a month to build up support and trust in the use of Structured & Codified Sig among end users.
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Work with the Surescripts integration team
The Surescripts integration team is available to work with you one on one to test and validate your implementation of Structured & Codified Sig. Reach out to your Surescripts Account Manager to get started.
RxChange champion
The RxChange champion award highlights organizations successfully advancing the RxChange transaction, which lets pharmacies communicate with prescribers to resolve prescription concerns within their electronic workflow.
One pharmacy reported saving 5–10 minutes per RxChange transaction.
RxChange requests nearly doubled in 2020, reaching 23.3 million transactions.
RxChange champion tips
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EHR vendors: Incorporate RxChange into your workflow
Customers who have had the most success with RxChange have incorporated it into existing workflows. RxChange has a much higher rate of utilization if prescribers are familiar with the workflow and it just becomes another logical step in the process.
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Health systems: Educate and train your prescribers
Help them understand the RxChange message, what impact it has on patient outcomes, and how to effectively respond to an RxChange request. Provide your end users with tools and tips for using RxChange. Ask your Surescripts Account Manager for resources.
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Pharmacies and pharmacy technology vendors: Enlist the help of pharmacists
Encourage or require pharmacists to provide specific, actionable information in their RxChange request (like an alternative drug recommendation identified using Real-Time Prescription Benefit). Prescribers may not respond if an RxChange request is unclear or ambiguous.
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EHR vendors: Share success stories
Enabling RxChange is a great first step, but your customers also need to see the value in using it. Winners of this category help foster trust and encourage their customers by telling success stories and sharing response rates of end users who have adopted it widely.
Timeline
White Coat Award program launches
Surescripts evaluates data available in Surescripts Sentinel® to determine finalists and winners
2022 White Coat Award winners announced
FAQ
In 2020, 84% of all prescribers utilized E-prescribing. There were over 1.9 billion e-prescriptions filled, a 7% increase. Simply adopting e-prescribing aids prescription accuracy and improves patient safety by presenting prescriptions in a clear, consistent format with less room for ambiguity and human error than handwritten prescriptions. But there's more work to be done. We now must turn our attention to the quality, accuracy and consumability of prescription data by ensuring electronic transactions are flawlessly executed—an area which has room for improvement.
For example, more than 1 in 10 e-prescriptions contains patient directions with a quality issue, which has the potential to cause confusion or workflow disruption at the pharmacy. Surescripts is dedicated to helping improve the accuracy of electronic prescriptions to reduce the need for manual intervention and prescription delays. Our Performance Optimization program for Prescription Accuracy & Optimization is focused on working with customers from across the Surescripts Network Alliance to measure and continuously improve prescription completeness and integrity. The Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes Surescripts Network Alliance participants' commitment to improving healthcare outcomes through prescription accuracy.
Since 2016, pharmacies, health systems, electronic health records (EHR) vendors and pharmacy technology vendors across the Surescripts Network Alliance® have worked together to improve e-prescription accuracy. In 2020, the Surescripts Network Alliance saw a 10% increase in the aggregated Quality Index Score for electronic prescriptions across the network—an 80% improvement since 2016. As a result, physicians and pharmacists spent less time exchanging phone calls and faxes to clarify prescriber intent. And the best part: this increased accuracy helped patients get the safe, effective care they deserve.
The following Surescripts Network Alliance participants are eligible for the 2022 Surescripts White Coat Award:
- Electronic health records vendors that contract directly with Surescripts, serve multiple provider groups and use approved compendia.
- Health systems that contract directly with Surescripts.
- Retail & mail-order pharmacies and pharmacy tech vendors that maintain their own pharmacy software, contract directly with Surescripts.
Eligible organizations will automatically be considered for the award based on data captured by Surescripts Sentinel (which is used to calculate each organization's Quality Index Score). No submission or application is required.
Quality Index Score is a rating system developed by the Surescripts Performance Optimization program which assigns a composite score between 1 and 1,000 to reflect overall e-prescription accuracy relative to 11 accuracy-related pain points. Quality Index Score is based on data provided by the Surescripts Sentinel e-prescription accuracy engine.
With input from hundreds of prescribers, pharmacists, technology vendors and drug compendia, Surescripts has identified and validated 11 of the most impactful problems affecting e-prescription accuracy. The Performance Optimization program for Prescription Accuracy & Optimization is focused on expanding the use and improving the accuracy of:
- Drug Description
- Drug Identification
- Sig (patient directions)
- Quantity Unit of Measure
- Days’ Supply
- Patient Notes
- Duplicate prescription reduction
- RxChange
- CancelRx
- Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances (EPCS)
- Provider & pharmacy directory integrity
Surescripts Sentinel monitors the accuracy of all electronic prescriptions sent across the Surescripts network, raising the bar for patient safety, care quality and workflow efficiency by pinpointing specific areas for improvement and providing analysis of electronic prescribing trends to inform better patient care.
It links multiple data sources including the Surescripts network and industrywide drug compendia such as the National Library of Medicine to provide actionable intelligence that is used to validate ongoing data quality improvements; identify opportunities to improve process efficiency; track e-prescribing utilization to identify trends and patterns; and inform research, white papers and clinical information.
Surescripts will evaluate the data available in Sentinel to determine finalists and winners.
This year, we will celebrate winners in three award categories: Highest Accuracy, RxChange Champion and Structured & Codified Sig Champion.
- Highest Accuracy: This award measures best prescription accuracy as of August 1, 2022, based on Surescripts Quality Index Score which is a measure of overall prescription accuracy based on data provided by Surescripts Sentinel.
- Champions: Champion awards celebrate customers for investing time and effort in implementing projects and products to drive prescription accuracy. In 2022, we will recognize an RxChange Champion and Structured & Codified Sig Champion for each segment. The winner will be selected based on data provided by Surescripts Sentinel.
Finalists and winners will be selected in three competition segments. Each competition segment contains three tiers based on transaction volume.
For the Highest Accuracy award category, two organizations will be named finalists in each tier, and one organization will be named a winner in each tier.
For the RxChange Champion award category, one organization will be named a finalist in each competition segment, and one organization will be named a winner.
For the Structured & Codified Sign Champion award category, one organization will be named a finalist in each competition segment, and one organization will be named a winner.
Electronic Health Records Vendors
- Tier 1: More than 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: Up to 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
Health System
- Tier 1: More than180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: 70,001 to 180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 3: Up to 70,000 monthly NewRx transactions
Retail & Mail-Order Pharmacies and Pharmacy Tech Vendors
- Tier 1: More than 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 2: 10,001 to 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 3: Up to 10,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
Finalists will be notified and winners will be announced based on the timeline below. Surescripts will reach out to participants in the preceding months to provide details on venue and logistics.
January: 2022 White Coat Award program launches
Early August: Surescripts evaluates data available in Surescripts Sentinel to determine finalists and winners
Mid-August: Finalists announced
September: 2022 White Coat Award winners announced
Each winning organization will receive:
- Plaque and letter of recognition
- Winner emblem for use in marketing materials
- Recognition during the Surescripts Network Alliance Forum
- Opportunity to be named in a Surescripts news release, social media, blog post, webinar or other event
