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FILLING A NEED
A lot can go wrong with prescriptions; e-prescribing aims to change that
BY JOSEPH PICARD
STAFF WRITER
Several months ago, A.J. Petro, 75, a retiree living in Berkeley, went to his local drugstore with prescriptions for his wife and himself.
It's a necessary ritual Petro performs regularly — carrying the slips of paper from the doctor's office, with medication and dosage scribbled thereon by the doctor's hurried hand, and delivering them to a pharmacist's assistant. He then sits, or wanders the drugstore aisles, waiting while the medicines are prepared.
But on this particular day, something went wrong. The pharmacist misread the doctor's handwriting.
"One of my wife's prescriptions was four times the regular dosage," Petro said, adding that no one realized a mistake had been made until he had returned home with the pills.
"I keep track of all our prescriptions and their costs on my computer," Petro said. "When I compared dosage and price on that one drug with what it had been in the past, I saw that it was wrong."
Petro contacted the doctor, who contacted the pharmacy, and the error was quickly corrected before Catherine Petro, 73, overdosed.
"The dose would probably not have been fatal," Petro said, "but it could have made her sick. And the mistake could have happened with some other drug. I was just lucky to have caught it."
Luck, although helpful to the Petros, is hardly a reliable ally in so serious a matter as prescription medication. A new electronic method of filing prescriptions aims to provide consumers — as well as physicians, phar-macists and insurers — with much stronger safeguards against bad penmanship and other hazards.
"E-prescription is the way of the future, and it's here now," said Dr. Joseph Raccuglia, a family practitioner on Stillwells Corner Road in Freehold Township. "We put it in place a year ago. It took about a month to get used to. Now we do all our prescribing electronically."
Dr. Richard Popiel, vice president and chief medical officer of Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, called e-prescription a "sea change" in how medication is distributed in this country.
Horizon is a partner in a federally funded pilot program to test and measure the effectiveness of e-prescribing. The government is underwriting the project for $1.85 million and more than 50 pharmacies at the Shore are participating.
Popiel said the government initiative was inspired by both the desire to have Medicare's new prescription drug benefit electronically managed, and the realization that all the personal medical data lost to Hurricane Katrina would have been saved if electronically stored.
Physicians also will now know if their patients are taking the prescribed medicine.
"Research shows, for instance, that one-third of heart medication patients are not filling their prescriptions, and doctors usually do not have the time to check on patients," Popiel said. "E-prescribing lets the doctor check."
The doctor also can see when a patient is trying to trick him, Raccuglia said.
"Some patients go through their prescription too quickly — double-dosing painkillers, for instance," he said. "When they run out, they'll come back to the doctor, saying the doctor must have made a mistake and not prescribed enough. In the past, I'd have no way to be sure. Now, I can just check the computer."
Popiel said the system is also designed to check the patient's personal history against prescriptions, to prevent dangerous cross-medications.
Raccuglia noted that the system provides doctors with the latest drug formularies, allowing them to better prescribe less expensive, generic substitutes.
David Hochman, a pharmacist at CVS on West Main Street in Freehold, said e-prescribing saves time.
"I used to spend too much time on the phone, talking to nurses, trying to get something straight," he said. "Now, I get a printout."
Joseph Picard: (732) 557-5738 or jpicard@app.com | 
