Inspiring excellence
Honoring leaders in prescription accuracy and performance 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 and performance forward. Whether you’re building more advanced e-prescribing software, resolving performance issues or enhancing workflows among pharmacists, the White Coat Award celebrates these achievements. View our complete list of winners from last year.
Clear, accurate and safe 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 performance, Surescripts White Coat Award winners prove that they are achieving measurable results through innovation that is moving the industry forward. 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 what targeted improvements to make.
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? Connect with RxChange end users.
Help your end users understand the RxChange message, what impact it has on patient outcomes and how to effectively send or respond to an RxChange request in a timely manner.
How can you win? Work with your Surescripts team.
If there are challenges or pain points you or your end users are experiencing, the Surescripts team can help. Reach out and we will work with you to help think of ways to solve your problems together.
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 Performance
The Highest Performance 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.
Innovation
The Innovation Award recognizes organizations making innovative strides toward performance optimization across the healthcare continuum. Winners of this category ensure prescribers and pharmacists can provide quality care to patients in a timely manner. Winners are determined by the White Coat Advisory Board and there will be one winner per segment: EHR vendors, health systems, and pharmacies and pharmacy technology vendors.
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: Average more than 2 million monthly NewRx transactions 
- Tier 2: Average up to 2 million monthly NewRx transactions 
Health systems that contract directly with Surescripts
- Tier 1: Average more than 180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: Average up to 180,000 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: Retail pharmacies and tech vendors averaging more than 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 2: Retail pharmacies and tech vendors averaging up to 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 3: Mail-order pharmacies
Questions about your eligibility? Contact your Surescripts Account Manager.
Contact us
Highest Performance
The Highest Performance Award recognizes the best overall performance 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 Performance 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 and drug identifiers align
Ensure drug descriptions and drug identifiers like the National Drug Code and RxNorm align to what’s recommended by your compendia. Past winners have worked closely with their compendia partner to ensure that their drug description matches their e-prescribing preferred name.
Innovation
The Innovation champion award recognizes organizations making innovative strides toward performance optimization.
In 2021, the Surescripts Network Alliance saw a 10% increase in the aggregated Quality Index Score for e-prescriptions across the network—a 200% improvement since 2016.
The rigorous technical and operational standards of Surescripts allows the network to operate with 99.99% uptime.
Innovation tips
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Think outside the box.
Innovation comes in all forms, and it requires being creative. Think of ways you can help improve time to therapy, reduce manual interventions or otherwise decrease friction for providers and patients.
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Work with your Surescripts team
If there are challenges or pain points you or your customers are experiencing, the Surescripts team can help. Reach out and we will work with you to help ideate possible approaches to these issues.
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.
The Surescripts RxChange response rate across the network was 32% in 2020, but in 2021, it had jumped to 40%.
RxChange Champion tips
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Connect with end users
Help your end users understand the RxChange message, what impact it has on patient outcomes and how to effectively send or respond to an RxChange request in a timely manner.
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Keep it within the workflow
RxChange has a much higher utilization rate when it becomes part of the end users’ interface and workflow.
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Prioritize and set alerts
Prioritize RxChange requests by complexity and set alerts or notifications to highlight outstanding requests.
Timeline
White Coat Award program launches
Surescripts evaluates data available in Surescripts Sentinel® to determine winners
2023 White Coat Award winners announced at the Surescripts Network Alliance® Forum
FAQ
In 2021, there were over 2.12 billion e-prescriptions filled, an 11% 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, integrity and performance. The Surescripts White Coat Award recognizes Surescripts Network Alliance participants' commitment to improving healthcare outcomes through prescription accuracy and measurable innovation that drives the network forward.
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 2021, the Surescripts Network Alliance saw a 10% increase in the aggregated Quality Index Score for electronic prescriptions across the network. 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 2023 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 1,300 to reflect overall e-prescription accuracy and performance relative to 12 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 12 of the most impactful problems affecting e-prescription accuracy. The Performance Optimization program is focused on expanding the use and improving the performance 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
- Diagnosis Code
Surescripts Sentinel monitors the accuracy and performance 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 Performance, RxChange Champion and Innovation.
- Highest Performance: This award measures best prescription performance as of August 1, 2023, based on Surescripts Quality Index Score which is a measure of overall prescription performance based on data provided by Surescripts Sentinel.
- RxChange Champion: This award celebrate customers for investing time and effort in implementing projects and products to drive RxChange. The winner will be selected based on data provided by Surescripts Sentinel and the White Coat Advisory Board.
- Innovation: This award recognizes organizations pursuing innovation towards optimizing performance. Winners will be nominated internally by Surescripts based on various factors and selected by the White Coat Advisory Board.
Winners will be selected in three competition segments. Each competition segment contains tiers based on transaction volume.
For the Highest Performance Award category, one organization will be named a winner in each tier.
For the RxChange Champion Award category, one organization will be named a winner.
For the Innovation Award category, one organization will be named a winner.
Electronic Health Records Vendors
- Tier 1: Average more than 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: Average up to 2 million monthly NewRx transactions
Health System
- Tier 1: Average more than 180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
- Tier 2: Average up to 180,000 monthly NewRx transactions
Pharmacies and Pharmacy Tech Vendors
- Tier 1: Retail/technology vendors averaging more than 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 2: Retail/technology vendors averaging up to 500,000 monthly RxRenewal requests
- Tier 3: Mail-order pharmacies
Each winning organization will receive:
- Plaque and letter of recognition
- Winner emblem, press release template and social media package 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
