Who Wins When Leaders Commit to Prescription Accuracy? Patients. That’s Something to Celebrate

“Patient safety is of primary importance, and prescription accuracy is essential to ensuring patient safety,” says Jill Helm.

Earlier this month, her company, Allscripts, won Surescripts 2018 White Coat Award, a recognition bestowed on the company for progress it has made in improving the accuracy of the prescriptions they send to pharmacies across the country.

“It's an honor to receive this award,” explains Helm, who serves as Allscripts’ Vice President of Business Development. “It’s a great demonstration and recognition of the work that we've done together to improve prescription quality.”

Allscripts was one of five electronic health records (EHR) companies to win the Surescripts 2018 White Coat Award for improving e-prescription accuracy. 

Allscripts, along with iSalus Healthcare, was recognized in the Trailblazer award category.  iSalus Healthcare also won in the Highest Accuracy category as did NextGen Healthcare, while Virence Health and MEDENT won for Most Improved Accuracy. Next year’s White Coat Award will recognize progress made by pharmacies and health systems in addition to EHRs.

And there’s no time like the present to recognize such leadership.

According to a recent Surescripts study, more than one in ten e-prescriptions—or nearly half a million a day—has a Sig (i.e., patient directions) that contains a quality issue. Such issues can cause confusion, errors and workflow disruption and have dangerous implications for patient safety.

“The White Coat Award represents some of our biggest success stories in tackling an industrywide problem by collaborating across the Surescripts Network Alliance,” says Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer of Surescripts. “By working together across markets, we are delivering on our purpose of increasing patient safety by moving beyond digitizing prescriptions to optimizing the entire medication process, ensuring that prescriber intent is clear each and every time.”

Awardees and other members of the Network Alliance have reason to be proud of their hard work: In 2017, Surescripts measured a 26 percent improvement in prescription accuracy by optimizing the e-prescribing process. Likewise, we eliminated 50 million potential instances each month where a pharmacist had to leave their workflow to clarify prescriber intent.

The White Coat Award is part of the Surescripts Critical Performance Improvement program. Created in 2015, the program brings together representatives from every facet of the Surescripts Network Alliance to identify and address e-prescribing pain points. Because quality improvements are needed across the Network Alliance to optimize the e-prescribing process, we are expanding the White Coat Award categories to include Pharmacy and Health Systems in 2019.

To learn more about what Surescripts is doing to enhance patient safety by improving prescription accuracy, subscribe to Intelligence in Action. And stay tuned for upcoming information about next year’s White Coat Award.