I wonder how burdensome it is to even get the tool fully integrated into the ehr. Like are the doctors not using it because it requires manual input of drugs and insurance? Even then, the doctors aren’t necessarily getting paid more for doing this extra work; it’s the payer (insurance) company that is primarily benefiting.<p>To be clear, I am acutely aware of just how hard it is to get this sort of thing working (MS in health Econ, phd in biomedical and clinical informatics). Just keeping track of all the formularies seems like a pain just to to begin with!
My experience with such a system has been that it would quote ridiculously high prices for generic medications, so I'd simply tell patients their drug is on the $4 list at WalMart. An information source that's unreliable is worse than no information at all, since it poisons the well for competing systems.
America is slow to adopt collective, independent negotiating of medical, hospital and prescription charges as happens in insurance, Medicare/Medicaid/Tricare. Med4all would solve this, rather than hunting around for big pharma "sales" and "promotions."
They lost me at "might."<p>You'd be hard-pressed to find many docs (myself included) who are champing at the bit to adopt an informational resource with knowledge gaps.
"Doctors slow to..." Implies all doctors. Then the article begins with an emotional story about one patient.
Statistical facts don't come from an emotional argument. That's what politicians and marketers do.<p>What's more likely: that the hardest working, highest average IQ professionals are slow to adopt something that would help them save their patient's lives? Or that the writer of the article is biased and exaggerating things?
Walmart, Target and some others have lists of low prices drugs for common conditions.<p><a href="https://www.walmart.com/cp/$4-prescriptions/1078664" rel="nofollow">https://www.walmart.com/cp/$4-prescriptions/1078664</a>
The industry is medieval. I had to get a CT scan in the ER while traveling once and the only way the medical records office could communicate to get the scan was fax or email, and they sent me the images by mailing a CD (in 2018)!
Why would they be fast? It's not their money. The incentive is not there. Meanwhile on the other side switching anything is work. Of course it doesn't get done super quick.