The Adoption and Increased Use of Electronic Prescribing of Controlled Substances

The electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) is now becoming implemented in most health care practices and pharmacies in the United States. This review aims to detail the steps needed for EPCS adoption and synthesize the most current literature on the benefits and challenges associated with its adoption. Our systematic review of seven published studies from 1990 to 2020 notes the benefits of EPCS in the reduction of errors, fraud, overprescribing, cost and efficiency improvements. There is limited published evidence of challenges, such as the cost of implementation and prescriber burden. With EPCS becoming a nationwide process, further research needs to be conducted to maximize the effectiveness of EPCS and explore additional benefits and challenges. We used a modified version of the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations) system for systematic reviews highlighted in the “Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions” to assess the quality of the primary studies reviewed.1 Each author was tasked with determining the quality of each primary study reviewed and assigning a quality score of either high, moderate or low quality. Evidence stemming from randomized controlled trials starts as high quality while evidence from observational studies starts as low quality. Quality can be lowered by five factors: risk of bias, imprecision, inconsistency, indirectness, and publication bias and can be raised by a large magnitude of effect and a clear dose-response gradient. We extracted data from the text, tables and graphs of the original publications. Appendix A illustrates the quality of the studies. Databases reviewed included PubMed, Google Scholar, Cochrane and SCOPUS. The search was started in 1990, with the first wave of the opioid epidemic and the first published studies of e-prescribing, and continued to the year of 2020. The key phrases “electronic prescribing of controlled substances,” “e-prescribing of controlled substances,” “fraudulent prescribing of controlled substances,” “EPCS with PDMP,” and “drug interactions with e-prescribing of controlled drugs” were used as an inclusion criterion to search online scholarly databases for articles. Only primary and secondary data from reports, reviews and research studies written in English were included. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), American Academy of Family Medicine (AAFP), and nationally represented health information networks were used to obtain updated statistics regarding EPCS.