The last great barrier to wide adoption of e-prescribing technology is falling, as Dr. Michael Blackman, CMIO of Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA, on Monday will send the first legal electronic prescription of a controlled substance. Working under a DEA waiver as part of an AHRQ-funded pilot program, Blackman will order a script for the potent painkiller OxyContin and have it electronically routed to a local Target pharmacy through a secure Internet channel, after checking the patient's medication history for any allergies or possible drug-drug interactions with DrFirst's Rcopia software. A test script successfully went through to a Target store last week.

"This landmark event comes in the wake of years of controversy regarding the DEA reluctance to allow electronic prescribing of controlled substances. Through the assistance of multiple local, regional and national agencies, DrFirst was able to overcome the complex regulatory environment which has delayed the launch of this pilot for years," the Rockville, MD-based vendor says in a guest post submitted to several healthcare blogs. It appears on the EMR and HIPAA blog, where John Moore of Chilmark Research calls the transmission of an electronic script for a controlled substance "an important milestone for digitizing healthcare."

For more:
- read the EMR and HIPAA blog post