February 02, 2024

Pharmacy Interoperability and Pharmacy Perspectives Coming Out of the ONC Annual Meeting

35 minutes

Another area where we haven't enabled pharmacists has to do with pharmacy interoperability. While almost every pharmacy out there now supports ePrescribing, the healthcare industry has fallen short when it comes to ensuring that pharmacists have full access to all of the prescriptions that have been filled for a patient. This puts patients into the untenable position of filling all their prescriptions at one location which can mean paying more for the same prescriptions or patients filling their prescriptions at multiple locations and the pharmacist doesn't know about all the prescriptions a patient has filled.

This was one of the many important topics I discussed with Cam Deemer, CEO at DrFirst, and Pooja Babbrah, Practice Lead, Pharmacy & PBM Services at Point of Care Partners, in a recent interview with Healthcare IT Today. In our discussion, we talk about early approaches to ePrescribing and how those efforts have led us to where we are at today including pharmacy interoperability (or lack thereof). Babbrah and Deemer have been on the front lines of these efforts and share important perspectives on what is changing now that has them hopeful for the future of ePrescribing and pharmacy interoperability.

Babbrah had also just attended the ONC Annual meeting and shares with us how ONC's interoperability and efforts to stop information blocking are going to impact medication sharing. She pointed out that ONC choosing to include a session on pharmacy interoperability and the fact that it was well attended were good steps forward in recognizing the importance of sharing medication data including with the pharmacy.

Learn more about DrFirst: https://drfirst.com/

Learn more about Point of Care Partners: https://www.pocp.com/

Health IT Community: https://www.healthcareittoday.com/

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