Surgeon, public health researcher, and author Atul Gawande is the new CEO of the health enterprise by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan. Gawande hopes to lower healthcare costs without raising risk, by helping professionals “make it simpler to do the right thing”. According to Gawande, “doing the right thing is incredibly complicated” in healthcare. He is a firm believer that data-driven and scalable solutions, such as electronic prescribing, can improve outcomes.
Gawande has devoted his career building scalable solutions for better healthcare delivery both in the US and across the world. In a recent paper, Gawande wrote about one of those solutions for curbing opioid epidemic: electronic prescribing. The use of electronic prescribing has several advantages as they prevent duplicated and forged prescriptions, reduce dosing errors, and simplify the prescription process for healthcare providers and patients.
The prescription pad is definitely ripe for disruption and precision prescribing software is an even more powerful solution to alleviate the burden that inappropriate prescribing has on patient safety and quality of care. Precision prescribing software increases medication safety and efficacy by incorporating complex information from the individual and their interactions including pharmacogenetic variants, laboratory results, other medications, diseases, and more. Powering every prescription with precision prescribing software has tremendous potential not only to increase medication safety and drug efficacy but also to reduce healthcare costs.
Gawande, a how-to-get-things-right evangelist, asks healthcare providers to take action by adopting better practices and tools for prescribing as well as by strongly encouraging and supporting those efforts, including advocating with information system managers for the adoption of electronic prescribing.