Electronic prescription system to cut state costs
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The state health agency is rolling out a new tool aimed at reducing Medicaid prescription drug program costs while improving patients health, officials announced Wednesday.
In April, some 500 physicians who participate in the government-run health insurance program for the poor will start using a new electronic system for prescribing medications.
“Patients will get the proper medications. Pharmacists will not have to guess at what a doctor wrote, and doctors will have the confidence that their patient actually goes to the pharmacy and has the prescription filled,” state Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine said.
“Finally, the state will save money because this initiative reduces the potential of medication errors before they occur,” Levine said.
Approximately 65 percent of Louisiana’s Medicaid patients — 737,380 people — received a pharmacy service last year. This resulted in Medicaid paying for more than 9.4 million prescriptions.
This year, DHH expects to spend about $537 million on pharmacy expenditures.
Levine said DHH will spend $1.2 million to put the technology into the offices of physicians that prescribe the most medicines. The expected savings from this investment is estimated at roughly $4.8 million annually.
The savings come from reducing the number of prescriptions per patient, reducing the cost of each prescription by using generic instead of brand-name drugs and by using drugs from the Medicaid Preferred Drug List, Levine said.
The method makes prescribing safer because the program checks for harmful interactions between other drugs prescribed for a patient, he said.
Initiatives similar to Louisiana’s are going on in Florida and Mississippi today where they have been shown to prevent errors, help physicians make more informed decisions and save millions of dollars, according to a DHH news release.
Gold Standard Inc., of Tampa, Fla., has the contract to provide the devices and necessary computer applications under the brand name eMPOWERx®.
