(U.S. Senate: Washington, D.C.) -- The cost of poor quality in health care accounts for from 30 to 60 cents of every health care dollar. Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and John Ensign (R-Nev.) along with a bipartisan group of legislators have introduced a bill that would expedite the adoption of electronic prescribing technology in every doctor’s office in America. Prescribing electronically instead of by-hand has been proven to save lives and cut costs on a massive scale.

As a result of prescription errors, American hospital patients are hit with 1.5 million injuries each year, according to the Institute of Medicine. Medication errors have killed at least 7,000 Americans in 2007. Of the more than three billion prescriptions written each year, doctors report nearly one billion require a follow-up between providers and pharmacies for clarification. The health-care system costs are in the billions.

Kerry’s bill would foster the adoption of e-prescribing by providing permanent Medicare funding for payment bonuses to physicians who acquire e-prescribing technology. In addition, for every Medicare prescription a doctor writes electronically, they will be paid an extra 1 percent bonus. Starting in 2011, Medicare physicians who are not electronically prescribing would face financial penalties.

“E-prescribing will save money, save time, save doctors from piles of paperwork, and most importantly, save lives,” says Sen. Kerry. “Deaths and injuries from handwritten prescriptions could be nearly eliminated if e-prescriptions were adopted on a wide scale. We need to seize this bipartisan opportunity and make this common sense reform a reality now.”

Dr. Andrew Warner, who heads the gastroenterology department of Lahey Clinic in Massachusetts, moved from handwritten prescriptions to electronic prescribing a few years ago. Warner says the real value of e-prescribing is its ability to reduce medication errors and save money. He prescribes straight from his hand-held computer—he taps on the screen and a prescription pad pops up.

“It has a list of all the drugs your patient is on,” Warner says in a December 17 story on NPR.org. “So you know everything they’re taking. And if there’s a particular medication you want to give your patient, you go ahead and just tap on it. If there’s an interaction between that drug and some drug that patient’s already on, a big red box will appear and say ‘safety alert,’ and tell you what that is.”

Lawmakers are hoping to attach the measure to legislation avoiding a scheduled 10 percent cut to doctors’ Medicare fees that goes into effect at the end of the year.

The bill picked up endorsements from the Consumers Union and from a group representing the prescription management companies that handle most Medicare Part D plans.

For more information, visit http://kerry.senate.gov/cfm/record.cfm?id=288317