Here come electronic prescriptions

Think about how we still get prescription medicines. A doctor writes in Latin on a little piece of paper. We carry that piece of paper to a pharmacist. This gives us an opportunity to lose the little piece of paper.

If we don't, the pharmacist tries to read it, gives up and calls the doctor to clarify. The pharmacist then checks to see if our insurance policy will pay for it. Then the pharmacist puts the pills in an orange, plastic bottle and puts stickers on it to warn us not to drink a bottle of whiskey and then go out and play on the tractor until we know how the pills will affect us.

The new way to do it is electronically. I'm sure we'll figure out how to screw that up, too. But it's catching on.

Some 200,000 doctors use e-prescribing, or roughly one in three office-based doctors. That compares with 156,000 at the end of last year, and 74,000 at the end of 2008, according to new data released by Surescripts, which operates the largest U.S. electronic prescribing network.

All this is driven by money, of course. And fear.

In 2009, Congress authorized $27 billion to promote electronic health records as part of the economic stimulus package. Incentives will be paid out over five years, and by 2015 providers will face penalties if they don't adopt the new technology.