January 2009

With a host of new incentives, doctors are finally beginning to scrap pen and paper in favor of electronic prescriptions. Medicare this month began paying doctors a bonus if they switch their patients over to e-prescribing. Some private health plans also have begun offering extra payments along with free equipment, such as digital handheld devices. And a coalition of technology companies is giving doctors free software to encourage them to ditch their paper prescription pads. As a result, the number of physicians prescribing medicines electronically has more than doubled in the past year to about 70,000, or about 12% of all office-based doctors. E-prescribing allows doctors to transmit prescriptions via a secure Internet network directly to pharmacies using an office or laptop computer or a digital handheld device. The practice has been shown in studies to reduce prescription errors and to cut costs for consumers and health-care providers. It also encourages patients to get more of their prescriptions filled, because it reduces the time spent waiting at drug stores. The Obama administration's plan to invest $50 billion over five years to encourage broader adoption of health-information technology is expected to include additional incentives for electronic prescribing. But there are still barriers to full-fledged adoption of e-prescribing. Federal drug laws, which are under review, prohibit electronic prescribing of controlled medications such as narcotics, insomnia drugs and anti-depressants. Safety experts also warn that selecting prescriptions on a computer screen can cause a doctor to inadvertently enter, for instance, a quick-release version of a drug instead of a long-acting formulation because they appear in sequence on an e-prescribing program.

Nine percent of U.S. TV viewers are still unprepared for the changeover from analog to digital come next month, says media agency Mindshare, which could impact the TV audience. These numbers are in line with previous estimates from a number of research companies over the last several months. Some U.S. viewers are doing nothing about the change--although they have at least one TV set in their home that has only analog service. "Now that the government has run out of money for converter box coupons, there are going to be a lot of sets that are not ready, which could impact the TV audience," said Debbie Solomon, managing director of business planning of Mindshare, in a release.

Months of planning by the USA's biggest cellphone carriers paid off Tuesday, with the Washington, D.C., networks of AT&T, Verizon and Sprint handling millions of additional calls, texts and downloads without any major incidents or failures. As of midday, Sprint was reporting a 211% increase in traffic — voice, data and text — in and around the Mall area in downtown Washington, site of the noon ET presidential inauguration. "There have been some delays in text deliveries and receipt, but otherwise, it's going very, very well," said Sprint spokesman John Taylor. He said calling volume dropped considerably after the swearing-in ceremony. The story was much the same at Verizon, which saw call volume more than triple in the hours leading up to the inauguration. Even so, there were no major disruptions, says Verizon spokesman John Johnson.

A number of savvy customers are realizing that while times are tough for consumers, they are also tough for cable and phone companies. Under intense pressure from Wall Street to keep subscribers as the economy sags and competition intensifies, many carriers are bent on retaining customers even if it means offering big price breaks. On the surface of it, the country's biggest carriers continue to boost prices despite the downturn. In January, Comcast and Time Warner Cable raised year-over-year prices by 6% for TV services, notes Craig Moffett, an analyst at research company Sanford C. Bernstein. AT&T Inc., meanwhile, increased the price of high-end services, such as bundled movie channels, by 30%. Behind the scenes, however, the companies are much more accommodating. Many are offering steep discounts to keep, win or win back customers. Consumers, reeling from the recession, are crafting novel ways to cut costs, including switching to cheaper prepaid cellphone plans and using Web-enabled mobile devices to connect to the Internet instead of buying home broadband connections. Negotiating with cable and phone companies may present a more direct route to saving on communications services costs. And companies are often happy to make deals with customers -- particularly if that allows them to poach them from rivals.