An RX for Deadly Doses

By Jeremy Caplan

Flawed prescriptions each year kill more than 7,000 people in the U.S. and injure more than 1.5 million. To reduce such errors, a coalition of health-care companies and tech firms is launching eRX Now, a Web-based program that will enable all physicians in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. It will also let them check drug interactions and prevent illegible hand-writing--or smudged decimal points on dosages--from ending in disaster. The $100 million project, whose backers include Allscripts, Dell, Aetna and hospital groups, is targeting the 30% of M.D.s who write 80% of the country's 3.2 billion prescriptions a year. (Although 90% of the 550,000 doctors in the U.S. are online, fewer than 10% use software to write prescriptions.) "Our goal long term is to get the prescription pads out of doctors' hands, to get them working on computers," says Dell V.P. Scott Wells. Docs going online will be good for patients--and for tech sales.