Looking at Patient Safety Enhancements for National Healthcare Quality Week

For those of us who work to advance healthcare quality, this week is a great opportunity to look at the progress we’re making. Surescripts is committed to improving e-prescribing as a means to improve patient safety. In fact, we believe in a future where this technology is perfect. That’s right—as in zero errors.

Achieving this ideal state requires coming together as an industry like never before, and recognizing that we’re one network. While the people on the network are rooted in different interests and goals, we’re all essentially in it for the same thing: to improve healthcare for all.

The creative solutions to some of our most challenging network problems reside right within the network. In other words, it’s the people on the network who possess the collective wisdom to affect positive change. Knowing this, we created Critical Performance Improvements (CPI) program, which brings together innovative thinkers from electronic health records (EHR) vendors, pharmacies, drug compendia and other partners to create the “place” where things get done.

This group has been hard at work for two and a half years, and we’re starting to see some very positive and very real results.

• Our provider directory has learned 500 new provider locations in the past year. Each new learned location creates an electronic route allowing for refill requests to be processed electronically for those physicians, cutting down on millions of inefficient paper refill requests.  
• More than two million CancelRx transactions have been sent. CancelRx creates a way for physicians to ensure that discontinued medications aren’t given to patients—a healthcare problem that occurs every minute in the U.S. and risks patient safety.
• So far in 2017, by improving drug description and identification best practices, we’ve eliminated 50 million instances in which a pharmacist needs to leave their workflow to get clarity in order to accurately fill a prescription.

See what a few of our network partners have to say about how e-prescribing quality, particularly the use of CancelRx, can improve patient safety.

We will continue to strive for perfect e-prescribing, and together as one network, we’ll seize the opportunities ahead of us to get it done.