The Advantages of Electronic Prescription, the Problems and Tackling Them

Abstract

The system of electronic prescription has been recently developed and used in the developed countries especially due to improvements of and with the help of information technologies.
When considering the level of information technology, it is surprising that electronic prescription has still been being prepared in the paper environment. Electronic prescription is a fundamental component of the electronic patient record, which seems to be the final target of health area. It has so important benefits such as; determining the most suitable drug and dosage for the patient, eliminating illegible hand-writing, shortening time for accessing the drug knowledge, enable to access the knowledge of drug and prescription at any time by mobile tools, enabling doctor and pharmacist to gain time, self updating the drug knowledge including fees, seeing and comparing the drug information, seeing the indications and contraindications of drugs while prescribing and thus informing the patient, decreasing side effects and drug allergies by this way, composing macros for favorite prescriptions, enable doctors to customize their drug lists, giving the retrospective and prospective statistical and epidemiological research facilities, contribution to medicine education by giving decision support for medical students, decreasing the interim approval mechanisms, contribution to both patient and medical workers’ satisfaction, easing the medico-legal inspections. Besides of its advantage, it brings some difficulties such as; data and communication security, interoperability, the need for legal arrangements, the needs for hardware, software and other sources, scalability, difficulty in adaptation of medical staff to new system. The system of electronic prescription will be an inevitable part of our life in near future. Besides of benefits, it brings some difficulties. To overcome these difficulties, cooperation of universities, public and private institutions is needed.