E-Prescribing in a Changing Legal Environment

Perhaps nothing permeates modern American society as much as prescription drugs. Evidence of this exists not just in television and magazine ads extolling the promises of Viagra and Nexium, but also in a few statistics. First, forty-six percent of Americans use at least one prescription drug daily. Further, in 2001, 3.1 billion prescriptions were issued in the United States at a cost of $132 billion.

That amount is projected to increase to $414 billion by 2014.3 Such numbers explain the intensity of the recent political and legal debates surrounding prescription drugs, such as the importation of American pharmaceuticals from Canada and the issuance of prescriptions online without visiting a physician.