Each year e-prescribing network Surescripts issues a report card highlighting progress from the previous year. The company noted that in 2018 it processed 17.7 billion transactions, a 29 percent increase over 2017.
Arlington, Va.-based Surescripts is owned by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (NACDS), National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA), CVS Health and Express Scripts. Its Surescripts Network Alliance includes virtually all electronic health records, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies and clinicians, plus an increasing number of health plans, long-term and post-acute care organizations and specialty pharmacy organizations.
The network added 8 million unique patients to its master patient index in 2018, which it says now includes 258 million patients, or nearly 80 percent of the total U.S. population and 93 percent of all insured patients.
The number of clinicians using Surescripts’ Record Locator & Exchange, which leverages the Carequality Interoperability Framework, to access patient records from anywhere in the country more than doubled to 106,000. They used the technology to access 108 million links to clinical document sources—a 586 percent increase over 2017—and to exchange 99 million care location summaries among 4,680 active healthcare organizations nationwide.
Citing examples of new use cases of the Record Locator & Exchange, Surescripts said a triaging emergency room physician learned of a patient’s serious cardiovascular disease and ordered an immediate transfer to the university hospital for aggressive treatment. In another case, a transplant coordination team reviewed health records for a new patient with lupus, learned of a previous blood clot diagnosis and added blood-thinning medications to her treatment plan as a result.
As nationwide opioid prescribing rates declined in 2018, the use of Electronic Prescribing for Controlled Substances (EPCS) increased by nearly half. The use of patient medication history data increased 21 percent as Surescripts expanded the reach of its Medication History service to include 90 percent of U.S. patients.
A nearly 90 percent increase in e-prescriptions for buprenorphine indicated that more clinicians used e-prescribing to help treat opioid dependence and misuse.
Driven by a 1,338 percent increase in provider adoption, in 2018, Surescripts processed 40.5 million real-time benefit checks at the point of care. Real-Time Prescription Benefit shows prescribers patient-specific, formulary-based out-of-pocket cost information for their chosen drug and their patient’s chosen pharmacy—as well as up to five therapeutic alternatives in real time within the electronic health record workflow.
Provider adoption of electronic prior authorization also surged 128 percent with data supplied directly from pharmacy benefit managers and health plans covering 89 percent of U.S. patients. And as of 2018, 80 percent of U.S. prescribers were using EHRs contracted to implement the solution—a 58 percent increase over 2017.
