Transparency in prescription drug pricing has several benefits. First, patients are likely to have better outcomes if they fill their prescriptions and adhere to their prescribed therapy. Second, physicians would garner higher quality scores if their patients took their meds and kept their chronic conditions under control. Third, widespread price transparency would force some pharmacy chains to reduce their prices to avoid losing customers to lower-priced competitors. This would benefit everyone in the system, including patients, plans, employers and taxpayers.
Drug price transparency in the e-prescribing workflow
Retail drug price information is not available in EHRs today. There are third-party solutions that could fill this gap, but EHR vendors aren’t yet convinced it would be worthwhile to spend time and money integrating such a tool into their electronic prescribing modules.
Having spent more than 20 years as the CTO and chief innovation officer at Allscripts, I know how challenging it can be to decide which functions or apps to add to an EHR. The executives in charge of product development must carefully consider all of the options they’re aware of to select the EHR enhancements most likely to be useful and attractive to their customers. The benefits of each potential enhancement must be weighed against the costs, usually measured in programming time. In addition, the executives must include the features required for Meaningful Use and MIPS in their products, making their choices even more difficult.
Because a drug transparency pricing tool could have such a strongly positive impact on patients, however, EHR companies are missing the boat if they neglect to add it to their prescribing modules. Moreover, the programing time required for the integration of this kind of tool with EHRs with is modest – only a day or two.
The value proposition for EHR vendors to adopt such a solution is straightforward. They could offer a feature-rich solution of great value to their customers for a very modest time investment. Those developers that adopted price comparison tools would have a first-mover advantage over their competitors. If more patients could afford to buy the drugs they were prescribed, they’d be more likely to comply with their care plans and have better outcomes. Finally, if physicians and patients could compare retail prices before drugs were prescribed, they would unleash real competition among pharmacies, which would lead to lower costs for consumers.
On all counts, it’s simply the right thing for EHR companies to do.
About the Author:
Stanley Crane is the chief technology officer of InteliSys Health. He was formerly the CTO and the chief innovation officer of Allscripts.
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