A better way: leveraging a proven and utilized system for improving current medication reconciliation processes.

In this reply to the commentary, "A Call for a Statewide Medication Reconciliation Program," published in the October 2016 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care®, authors note that although they agree with the authors' assessment of the problem, they believe there is a proven and scalable solution to improve medication reconciliation that is already available to, and used by, clinicians.

Dispatch from the non-HITECH-incented Health IT world: electronic medication history adoption and utilization.

Objective: To document national trends of electronic medication history use in the ambulatory setting and describe the characteristics and predicting factors of providers who regularly use medication history transaction capabilities through their e-prescribing systems.

Materials And Methods: The study used provider-initiated medication history data requests, electronically sent over an e-prescribing network from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Data from 138,000 prescribers were evaluated using multivariate analyses from 2007 to 2013.

HITECH spurs EHR vendor competition and innovation, resulting in increased adoption.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act was enacted to increase electronic health record (EHR) adoption by providers and hospitals. Experts expressed skepticism about whether the program would indeed hasten adoption and could be implemented in time for the initial reporting period. Could EHR vendors meet the certification requirements, and could the industry innovate to meet small-practice needs? This study, in addition to documenting increased provider adoption, provides the first evidence of increased competitiveness and innovation in the EHR industry spurred by HITECH.

E-prescribing adoption and use increased substantially following the start of a federal incentive program.

E-prescribing, or the electronic generation of a prescription and its routing to a pharmacy, is generally believed to improve health care quality and reduce costs. However, physicians were slow to embrace this technology until 2008, when Congress authorized e-prescribing incentives as part of the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act. Using e-prescribing data from Surescripts, we determined that as of December 2010, close to 40 percent of active e-prescribers had adopted the technology in response to the federal incentive program.