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Alaska becomes last state to adopt E-Rx

EHR Connection, September 17, 2007

All 50 states and Washington, DC, allow e-prescribing, now that Alaska has enacted laws and regulations permitting use of the technology, according to a September 4 iHealthBeat article.

Legal and bureaucratic red tape have delayed universal adoption of the technology since SureScripts-founded by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores and the National Community Pharmacists Association-began meeting with state legislators and pharmacy boards in 2002 to ensure the legality of e-prescribing.

In 2004, laws and regulations in nearly half of the states would have prohibited the electronic exchange of prescription information, because the network could be considered a third party.

"We definitely did not anticipate that it would have taken the number of years that it has since we started doing this," said Kevin Hutchinson, president and CEO of SureScripts. "The interesting thing is that we never found a single state or a single pharmacy board who was anti-e-prescribing," he said. Hutchinson added that it was "the normal political process of some of the markets and some of the states that did in fact slow down getting this done through all markets."

More than 95% of the nation's retail pharmacies use certified e-prescribing software, but neither state nor federal law requires the use of e-prescribing. To read the iHealthBeat article, click here.

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