Another day, and there are more interoperability gains to report. A day after the Carequality collaborative announced that it had hit two significant milestones, health IT connectivity network SureScripts comes out with its annual National Progress Report, and the numbers are promising.
Arlington, Virginia-based Surescripts reported that in 2015, for the first time, more than 1 million healthcare professionals connected to its network, which started as an e-prescribing conduit and has expanded into wider health information exchange. The Surescripts network processed 9.7 billion electronic transactions last year, up 48 percent from 2014.
That total includes 1.4 billion electronic prescriptions, or 77 percent of all scripts written in the U.S. The share compares to 67 percent in 2014 and 58 percent in 2013.
E-prescribing totals were boosted by electronic scripts for controlled substances, which soared by 359 percent last year to 12.8 million. It was only in August 2015 that Vermont became the final U.S. state to legalize e-prescribing of Schedule II-IV drugs. Still, only 5.7 percent of physicians had the proper technology to e-prescribe controlled substances.
Expect those numbers to continue to grow. This year, electronic prescriptions became mandatory in New York state and e-prescribing will be required in Maine for opioids and benzodiazepines starting in July 2017.
In terms of other HIE, Surescripts reported that it processed 1.05 billion medication history requests and handled 15.28 million clinical messages last year. The latter is more than double the 2014 total of 7.36 million messages. “We’re seeing bright spots in clinical messaging,” said Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Surescripts estimated that the increased sharing of medication histories saved U.S. hospitals $400 million in 2015. “I think it’s evidence of a maturing market,” Skelton said.
Skelton does, however, still see a lot of work ahead. “All the work being done is great, but there’s huge hill to climb,” he said.
He noted that there is still a major lack of connectivity in long-term care and with durable medical equipment. Long-term care was excluded from the federal Meaningful Use health IT incentive program, so that segment is playing catch-up on that front.
Going forward, Skelton said that people involved in health information exchange need to be cognizant of privacy and security issues, as well as of data integrity.
“We need to make sure everyone on the network is a trusted partner,” Skelton explained. “We also need to focus on the quality of data.”
On the second part, Skelton cited Surescripts research showing that two-thirds of every prescription that flows across the network is free, unstructured text. This results in one out of every 10 e-prescription needing human intervention, inviting the opportunity for errors, he said.
It’s sadly ironic that Surescripts and Carequality released their data just days after activist patient Jess Jacobs died at the tender age of 29. Jacobs frequently blogged, tweeted and spoke of her frustrations in trying to move her health data from one doctor to another.
“We should continue to be impatient [about the lack of interoperability] and continue to push forward, but we should recognize the progress we have made,” Skelton said.
Image: Surescripts
