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Electronic medical records are promoted as a way to lower overall healthcare costs, but data to support this assertion are limited. Researchers assessed the effect of an electronic prescribing (e-prescribing) system that prompts physicians to select tier 1 (generic) over more-expensive tier 2 and 3 medications. This study was conducted among 35,000 outpatient clinicians; 1200 of them used an e-prescribing system provided by two large insurers in Massachusetts.
Overall, the rate of prescribing a tier 1 agent increased from 54.8% to 58.5% among clinicians who used e-prescribing (although only 20% of their prescriptions were electronically generated) and from 53.2% to 55.8% during the same period among nonusers. The increase in tier 1 prescribi…