WASHINGTON – If it were up to Danny Sands, MD, writing a prescription on paper would be malpractice.

Sands, who works at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is also chief medical officer for Dallas-based ZixCorp., which develops e-prescribing technology. Sands is among the growing number of healthcare leaders today who are advocating electronic prescribing.

"It's malpractice to prescribe drugs using paper," he said.

Industry figures show that from 5 to 18 percent of U.S. physicians are using e-prescribing today, but healthcare leaders predict that number will climb substantially in 2005.

Lewis Redd, national leader of Capgemini's health practice expects the use of e-prescribing to double in 2005.

"We have pretty good proof that electronic prescribing can reduce errors," Redd said. "So, I think that will drive adoption. The other thing will be convenience," he said.

The traditional route of a paper prescription from physician to patient, patient to pharmacy, and pharmacy to patient, is simply too cumbersome and wasteful, he said.

In addition, too many things can go wrong. Among some of the problems, Sands noted, are illegibility, interactions, dosage errors and contraindications. Paper prescriptions are also lost or can be altered.

With computer-generated prescriptions, interactions are checked, dosages verified. There are formulary checks and decision support available. Universal adoption of e-prescribing can save $27 billion a year, according to eHealth Initiative. More importantly, it can boost patient safety and save lives.

Both safety and convenience were factors in the recent rollout of e-prescribing to 1,000 physicians at the University of North Carolina Health Care System in November.

Electronically connecting doctors and other UNC physicians to pharmacists through the SureScripts network was accomplished "for the purpose of improving the safety and efficiency of the prescription process," said Robert G. Berger, MD, director of informatics for UNC Health Care and a professor of medicine in the UNC School of Medicine.

Outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson underscored the boost electronic prescribing would give patient safety when he announced his resignation on Dec. 3.

"Doctors have to get straight As to get into medical school anywhere in America, except in handwriting," he said.