Drug Ordering
The following message is provided courtesy of the United States DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration). Just another reason consumers should ALWAYS use extreme caution when ordering prescription drugs over the Internet.1
OTN’s online drug ordering service features secure 24 hour access to online ordering from OTN’s extensive catalog of products, along with pricing and product availability information, as well as additional clinical information from OTN’s Oncology Online Web site. Order forms are customized for each practice.2
OTN’s online drug ordering service features secure 24 hour access to online ordering from OTN’s extensive catalog of products, along with pricing and product availability information, as well as additional clinical information from OTN’s Oncology Online Web site. Order forms are customized for each practice.3
Computerized drug ordering systems, first devised in the late 1970s, received a major boost in 1999 when the IOM endorsed them as a key way of reducing medical errors, which are estimated to kill as many as 98,000 hospitalized patients annually. Drug errors are the most common kind of medical mistake, and some studies have found that computerized systems can reduce medication errors caused by illegible handwriting and faulty transcription.4
If hospitals, for example, would adopt computerized drug-ordering systems for doctors, experts say, the number of serious drug errors could be cut by 50 percent. Yet only about 10 percent of the country’s 6,000 hospitals have a fully implemented system.5