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.

Results: Medication history use showed significant growth, increasing from 8 to 850 million history requests during the study period. Prescribers on the network for <5 years had a lower likelihood of requests than those on the network for 5 or more years. Although descriptive analyses showed that prescribers in rural areas were alongside e-prescribing, and requesting medication histories more often than those in large and small cities, these findings were not significant in multivariate analyses. Providers in orthopedic surgery and internal medicine had a higher likelihood of more requests than family practice prescribers, with 12% and 7% higher likelihood, respectively.

Discussion: Early adopters of e-prescribing have remained medication history users and have continually increased their volume of requests for medication histories.

Conclusion: Despite the fact that the use of medication histories through e-prescribing networks in the ambulatory care setting has not been encouraged through federal incentive programs, there has been substantial growth in the use of medication histories offered through e-prescribing networks.