ePrescribing of Controlled Substance (EPCS) Now Allowed Nationwide

This is really exciting news. Especially for me since the only post I’ve ever taken down after it was published was a post I did about an FDA pilot of controlled substances on September 13, 2009. It turns out the press release I got was premature and so I took down the post since it wasn’t accurate information. About 6 years later (technically the DEA first proposed the rule in 2008), we finally have ePrescribing of controlled substance available in all 50 states.

Surescripts put together this great animated gif to celebrate the occasion.

We still have some work to do to get every doctor on board with ePrescribing, let alone ePrescribing controlled substances, but we’re getting there. In fact, I suggested today at me EHR workshop in Dubai that ePrescribing has been one of the most successful standards in healthcare. Can you think of any other healthcare standard that’s been more successful? HL7 lab data comes close, but I still take ePrescribing.

How long until we have near 100% adoption of ePrescibing? Any predictions?

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • NYS has made EPCS a law/requirement as of March 28 2016. As a result, all our clients have this functionality now. We have also had good responses from both providers and patients alike. It is consistent and most secure for providers and much more convenient for patients. This is a good example of technology providing a safer, better result for all.

  • To me this is one of the most important results of the whole movement to EHR’s, even though it can work quite independently. Prescription inaccuracy has long been huge, and this has an ability to greatly reduce that. Plus it should make tracking of prescription abuse somewhat easier.

    However, if one sends an e prescription to a pharmacy that can’t or won’t handle it properly, it is crucial that there be a very quick response so that it can be moved to another pharmacy. One of the advantages of paper prescriptions; if you go to a pharmacy and they can’t fill it, you go to another with that piece of paper, a flexibility that is now missing, and needs to be dealt with.

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