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Kane County Chronicle
Prescribing made Easy
By Eric Schelkopf - eschelkopf@kcchronicle.com
Antoinette Kolnicki hated waiting for her prescriptions at the pharmacy.
Luckily, that no longer is something the 85-year-old Bartlett resident has to do, since her doctor decided to go paperless five years ago.
These days, St. Charles physician Stasia Kahn electronically transmits Kolnicki’s prescriptions to the pharmacy.
"I have no contact with the pharmacist, only when I have to pick up my medicine," Kolnicki said. "She just takes care of it with her computer. The convenience is great."
Electronic prescribing is one of the benefits cited by proponents seeking to expand the use of electronic health records. The federal government has set a goal of universal adoption of electronic health records by 2014.
U.S. government officials anticipate switching to electronic health records will result in an annual savings of about $140 billion.
Kahn formed a private practice five years ago with two other doctors. At that time, they decided to start fresh by implementing electronic record keeping.
"If we are in front of a computer anywhere, we have access to a patient's charts," Kahn said. "That makes us extremely efficient."
She is vice president of Northern Illinois Physicians for Connectivity, which is working to expand the use of electronic health records to improve patient care. Delnor-Community Hospital in Geneva , a participant in the group, recently hosted a meeting led by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that brought together key stakeholders to discuss the issue
The group this spring will submit an application with the CMS seeking to become of the 12 communities chosen for a national demonstration project to encourage medical practices to adopt electronic health records.
CMS in June will announce the 12 communities selected for the demonstration project.
Over a five-year period, the project will provide financial incentives to as many 1,200 physician practices that use certified electronic health records to improve quality as measured by their performance on specific clinical quality measures.
"When I am in the room with a patient, I can show them the lab reports," Kahn said. "They can visually see it on the screen. They can look at it and view it."
However, one report last fall warned that electronic medical records are at risk of being hacked.
The eHealth Vulnerability Reporting Program was formed to assess the security of the nation’s electronic health records.
To address the security problems, the report made several recommendations, included that software vendors for electronic health records do more testing of their systems' security and disclose any vulnerabilities they find.
Unauthorized access to electronic health records is punishable by law.
Delnor Hospital Chief Information Officer James Kearns said physicians today faced the challenge of "drowning in paperwork."
"The physicians don’t always have the information when they need it," Kearns said. "There’s always missing documentation or it’s misfiled. It just all sort of snowballs from there. So there is a huge opportunity for physician offices, and once they become more electronic, it allows hospitals to become much more efficient as well because we would be totally exchanging electronic information. Delnor is exploring ways that we can help the physicians, and help them get into the electronic world."
