New network to provide Rx info in disasters

A new Web site, refined from one rushed together after Hurricane Katrina scattered Louisiana residents nationwide, is ready to help doctors and pharmacists get patients’ prescription histories almost instantly after a disaster.

It’s called In Case of Emergency: Rx or ICERx, after the acronym many agencies recommend people program into their cellular phones to make their personal emergency contacts easy for rescue workers to find.

The site, http://www.icerx.org/, will be formally unveiled last Tuesday during the National Association of Chain Drug Stores’ annual meeting in Phoenix, said Rick Ratliff, chief operating officer of SureScripts, created in 2001 to set up an electronic health information network.

After an earthquake, hurricane or other disaster, representatives from the NACDS and the National Community Pharmacists Association, which represents independent pharmacies and is SureScripts’ other parent group, would decide during a conference call whether to open the site.

Chains would make available prescription histories from affected Zip codes. A company that processes claims for independent pharmacies would provide data for that group. Individual independent pharmacies also could sign on to provide information.

Most physicians who already use medical records and prescribing software could use those programs to get the prescription histories, Ratliff said in a telephone interview.

Other physicians and all pharmacists would call a toll-free number to verify their credentials and get a login ID and password for the portal.

Fewer than one in five doctors send prescriptions electronically, and probably about 5 percent do so regularly, said Todd Stein, spokesman for Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc.

There are limits to what will be available at the new site. Some pharmacies’ records may not get into the database. And, because of privacy concerns, people who use the Web site won’t see records for medicines used to treat “sensitive” conditions n mental illness, chemical dependencies, or HIV/AIDS.

The site’s prototype, http://www.Katrinahealth.org, opened 3 1/2 weeks after Hurricane Katrina flooded the New Orleans area on Aug. 29, 2005. People from New Orleans and neighboring St. Bernard, Plaquemines and Jefferson parishes were spread from Rhode Island to California.

Like people anywhere, many were on prescriptions. Most had expected their evacuations to last only a few days, like evacuations over the previous 40 years.

Insurance companies, Medicaid, pharmacy chains and pharmacy benefit managers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama provided information about prescriptions patients had bought during the four months before Katrina.

Dr. Roxane Townsend, then Louisiana’s medical director for Medicaid and now the state’s deputy health secretary, said the system was a success, at least from a technology standpoint.

“You learn that during an event is not the time to get people to use a new system,” Townsend said.

Or the best time to tell people about it.

Randy Carr, who reopened two drugstores on the west bank of Jefferson Parish nine days after the hurricane, said he hadn’t heard about Katrinahealth.org until a reporter told him Thursday. He would have used it often, he said.

“We did a lot of work with Katrina victims, with MASH units,” he said.