On January 16, a coalition of the nation’s most prominent technology companies and leading healthcare organizations (including Aetna, Allscripts, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Sprint Nextel, SureScripts, WellPoint, and Wolters Kluwer Health) announced a national initiative to provide free electronic prescribing for every physician in America. The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) is the first nationwide effort to improve patient safety by offering a solution to the medication errors that harm millions of people each year. Preventable medication errors injure at least 1.5 million Americans and claim more than 7,000 lives each year, according to a July 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences. In an effort to reduce these errors, the IOM has called on all of the nation’s physicians to adopt electronic prescribing by 2010. 

“While medication errors and adverse drug events can be common and serious, electronic prescribing is clearly a tool that can dramatically reduce errors and improve patient safety,” said Nancy W. Dickey, currently President of the Health Science Center and Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs at the Texas A&M University System and formerly President of the American Medical Association. “Yet despite the many benefits of electronic prescribing, physician adoption is still modest. The situation calls for a solution that will overcome the barriers many physicians face in adopting this life-saving technology.”  To read the entire press release about this important initiative, go to the Allscripts news page here.