You walk into your clinic glancing through your appointment diary and see one of your cutest patients name mentioned- a four years old girl with the chubby cheeks. As the visit progresses, you realize she’s suffering from an ear infection, and you prescribe her a treatment of antibiotics. You switch to your e-Prescription software, and as soon as you enter the name of the drug, a notification pops up, reminding you of known allergies. The kid is allergic to one of the antibiotics.

Isn’t it amazingly simple? That’s how e-Prescription software works for you.

With a wide range of benefits to offer, healthcare organizations are enthusiastically switching to e-Prescription software to automate the process and make it more efficient. If you, too, are one of them, here is a little help from team Matellio.

What is e-Prescription Software?

With an e-prescription software, physicians can generate a prescription electronically and share the same with the pharmacy stores in the least time. The software offers a wide range of benefits in addition to this. Some of them include lesser dosage errors, better patient safety, simplified medication workflow, and higher patient satisfaction. The software seamlessly connects various nodes of healthcare services, including healthcare professionals, patients, and pharmacists, to enable best-in-class care services.

What are the Top Benefits of e-Prescription Software?

1. Prevents Medication Errors
2. Automates Clinical Decision Support
3. Speed Up Medication Process
4. Better Treatments with Full Visibility
5. Medication Tracking and Reminders
6. Single Workflow Prescribing

1. Prevents Medication Errors

Incorrect and confusing handwriting of the doctors often leads to dispensing the wrong medicines. Many times, it also happens that similarly spelled drugs are delivered to the patients. This scenario isn’t just bewildering but also can cause severe symptoms in patients and, worse, can be life-threatening in many cases. E-prescriptions are a great way to eliminate the same.

2. Automates Clinical Decision Support

e-Prescription software allows the physicians to make informed decisions at the point-of-care. Every medicine in the market comes in various forms and strengths. Traditional prescriptions suggest the drug in multiple combinations and details. However, they may miss it at times. With e-prescriptions, that’s not the case. Here, you are supposed to fill all the required details, including dosage, strength, frequency, intake, and more. It also gets you through a drop-down menu that brings the list of available medicines at fingertips along with the standard parameters to select from. This doesn’t just deliver information correctly but also helps with disease profiling.

3. Speed Up Medication Process

Paper-based prescriptions can be easily lost, making it difficult for doctors to track medical history. Moreover, even if you have all the medicines handy, tracking them manually is a tedious task. This can be easily solved with the e-prescriptions. The patient’s entire medical history is available on the screen and can be accessed anytime, from anywhere. Every single drug to drug interaction is saved in the application memory. This, combined, serves as an excellent booster for the medication process.

4. Better Treatments with Full Visibility

With everything clearly documented and stored within the software, e-prescription software gets the full physicians the visibility of the allergies and previously prescribed drugs. The features of the software instantly alert the physicians of the known allergies or in case the medicine might cause severe symptoms. It, thus, helps the doctors prescribe better medication and suggest substitute therapies.

5. Medication Tracking and Reminders

With traditional prescriptions, it is easier for one to miss out on the medicines, or worse, lose the prescriptions. Moreover, many times, patients stop their treatment as soon as they start feeling better.  No effective tracking methods are available.

e-Prescriptions help doctors to track whether patients are religiously following their treatment regimen. Patients can also schedule their medication reminders to make sure they stay on their medicine schedules.

Also Read- How to Develop a Medication and Pill Reminder App?

6. Single Workflow Prescribing

Traditional prescriptions are single-paper based prescription history and required a separate prescription for controlled substances that went explicitly to mail-order pharmacies or retail outlets. This makes the process manual and tedious. e-Prescriptions make it easier for the physicians to send prescriptions to mail-order pharmacies similar to how one would send to regular drug pharmacies. This single workflow makes the process more efficient, highly satisfying for patients, as well as supports medical adherence.

Who Uses an e-Prescription Software?

e-Prescription software offers a sigh of relief to almost every single user in the healthcare ecosystem. The general category of users include:

• Doctors
• Patients
• Pharmacy store owners
• Caretakers or nursing staff

How to Build an e-Prescription Software?

Step 1: Planning and Research

Everything begins with effective planning. Before you kick off the e-Prescription software development process, it’s vital to get the key stakeholders as well as the users into the picture and ensure that each of them understands the value of this software. Get into the detailed discussions with experts by leveraging healthcare technology consulting services and list down:

• Challenges that might stop you from effective implementation of the e-Prescription software
• What features will make the software worth for each user
• Platforms where they are comfortable using the app

Step 2: Decide on the Features

Once you have had a discussion with the target users, and understood their needs, narrow down the list of features that you would like to include in the software. Generally, the following features are a part of e-prescription software.

e-Prescription Software Features for Patients

• Check prescriptions and its history: This feature allows patients to assess their prescriptions from anywhere, any time. Patients will also be able to check their past prescriptions via this and evaluate it anytime they wish to consult the doctor about it.
• Medicines and their Information: This would enable the patients to check the medication they are prescribed and check every vital information such as dosage, medicine time, possible side-effects, alternate medicines, and comparative costs, etc.
• Medication Reminder: Strictly adhere to your medicine schedule with a medication reminder feature.
• Place and Track Orders: With prescription available online, patients can share the same with pharmacy owners and place the order for doorstep delivery. Patients are also able to track their orders via the same screen and can stay abreast of their order status in real-time.
• Order History: as the name suggests, patients will be able to view the history of orders and can place a repeat order if need be.
• Inbuilt Payments: Place the order and pay via system itself easily using various payment options.
• Patient Information: Patients can update their information on the system and access the same as and when needed. Information such as insurance details, personal details, medical experts treating him/ her, patient status, allergies, etc. are displayed under this section.
• Cancel Orders: Patients can cancel an order in a single click. 

e-Prescription Software Features for Doctor Panel

• Access Drug Database and Generate Prescriptions: Doctors will be able to access the database of medicines and add medicines to the e-Prescriptions for the patients. The database will also enable doctors to search the drugs by brand names, class, specialty. They can also create a list of medicines that they wish to access quickly when needed.
• Patient Information: This would help the medical practitioners to get a glimpse of the patient’s profile, including the other treatments they are undergoing, known allergies, patient background, blood group, and most importantly, medication history, etc.
• Cancel: This would enable doctors to cancel the medicines in case prescription needs to be changed, or a specific medicine has been added by mistake.
• Pending List: This list keeps the doctors updated about the pending medication list about a particular patient. For instance, when the initial treatment is over, they can begin the next one in a few taps.
• Share Prescriptions: Doctors can share prescriptions with pharmacy stores in a single click.
• Customizable Views: Leverage innate toolbars to sort a field or put together specific information properly.
• Generate Reports: It can generate patient-specific/practice-wide reports in Excel, Word, PDF, or any of these files formats: HTML, MHT, RTF, XLS, XLSX, CSV, Text or Image file.
• Documentation Capabilities: Patient’s medical adherence can be easily documented within the software, including which medicines have been ordered and when it is required to be refilled. These reports can be integrated with the EHRs, and patient care reports over time can be generated.

e-Prescription Software Features for Caretakers

• Known Allergies: This would help caretakers be aware of the known allergies so that they can be careful
• Medication History: This would keep caretakers in the loop about the medication history of the patient so that they are clear about the dosages and other vital information.
• Refill Request: Nursing staff can share refill requests to the pharmacies via this feature and notify them timely about the upcoming refill dates.
• Medication Doses: This would give the caretakers a better idea of the prescribed medicines and corresponding doses.
• Medication Timing: This would alter the nursing staff about the medication timings to ensure medication adherence.

e-Prescription Software Features for Pharmacists

• Patient Information: This would help the pharmacists to get a glimpse of the patient’s profile detailing known allergies, patient background, blood group, and, most importantly, medication history, etc.
• Doctors Details: It brings the doctor’s information handy for reference, insurance, and personal details, and also allows referring to the current e-prescription and patient status.
• Receive and Save e-Prescriptions: This allows the pharmacy store owners to receive e-prescriptions and save them in the system memory.
• New Orders: This would initiate the order requests in the system of pharmacy owners.
• Manage Orders: This would allow the pharmacies to accept/ reject orders as required.
• Order History: This would give detailed insights into various orders via software, including the new ones, completed ones, and the pending ones.
• Track Payments: Pharmacy stores can track payments from the software itself.
• Drug Database: This brings all the drugs available at the pharmacy stores at the fingertips. One can also search for the medicines by the brand and generic drug names, class, specialty, as well as a favorite list, can be created.
• Receive Payments: This would allow pharmacy stores to receive payments within the app. 

Step 3: Choose the Platform

This is the most critical aspect. If your majority of the users are available on smartphones, it is a sheer waste of time and money to develop a desktop application. Make sure you know your audience well to take a call finally.

Our Take: a SaaS application like e-prescription software generally takes the following platforms into account:

• Smartphone application
• Web application

This would determine the technology stack which will be shared by the development company you hire

Step 4: Find the Right Healthcare Software Development Company

It’s time to choose the development partner who will give shape to your ideas and vision. Here is what you need to consider while choosing a software development company for the development of e-prescription software:

• Expertise in delivering SaaS applications and experience in the realm of healthcare
• Added expertise in the latest technologies like AI, ML, Blockchain, Cloud Integration, and more to make sure that the company you hire can upgrade your application to meet the changing market demands.
• Rich portfolio with active links so that you can get a glimpse of the projects and their quality
• Reviews and ratings by clients to know the type of customer experience they offer
• Software development process followed by them and types of engagement models offered by them
• Post-deployment support provided by the software development company
• Last but not least, have them clearly stated the cost to develop the healthcare CRM software you need. Generally, that depends on the number of features, deployment type, number of users, and more.

Step 5: Cost to Build the e-Prescription software

Multiple factors are considered for determining the cost of developing e-Prescription software.

• Features and functionality
• Third-party integrations
• Certifications and compliances
• Size of the development team
• Number of system users
• Technology stack

Make sure you are through with the previous steps before hopping onto this step to ensure an accurate estimate.

Step 6: Choose the Engagement Model

Once you are through with the software development company, it’s time to choose the engagement model that suits you the best. Here are the options available:

Time and Material Basis Model: This is the best fit for:

• Long-term projects with dynamic requirements
• Unclear project requirements
• Flexibility to modify the scope or vary workloads

Turnkey Model: This model is suitable for:

• Short-term projects or MVP development
• Projects with a well-defined scope
• For assigning test task to the developers

Dedicated hiring model: Choose a Dedicated Resource Hiring for

• Dynamic project requirements
• Varying workloads and timeframes
• Long-term projects and flexibility

Also Read- How is IoT Revolutionizing the Healthcare Industry?

Ready to Build Custom e-Prescription Software? 

Matellio LLC is a software engineering services company enabling smooth digital transformations for the healthcare organizations across the geographies. With over 600 successful projects in our portfolio, including numerous from the healthcare realm, our team of experts takes pride in delivering quality solutions based on the latest tools and technology. Our relentless focus on customer relationships inspires us to ensure maximum client satisfaction through a user-centric approach. For over two decades, we have been a company focused on bringing quality solutions that drive growth for our clients.