I had to make a visit to the emergency room over christmas. To my surprise, the prescriptions were printed out by computer. As long as the doctor selected or entered the correct drug and dosage from the database, the computer printed it out for the pharmacy. That was in the Moses Cone Hospital in Greensboro. However, the military has been doing this for years. A doctor has to select a drug from a database and an approved dosage and the prescription is printed and goes directly to the screen at the pharmacy. You walk over to the pharmacy (it is in the same building) and your prescriptions are usually already ready and waiting for you.



>I've seen tons of medical charts in my time..
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>"Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year."
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>http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html