There needs to be a standard electronic communication protocol between doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. This would probably be a good canitate for some type of XML communication.

Some of the issues are authentication and verification of the data, also privacy is a big one. If this were put in place though it would make trips to the pharmacy much easier. Your doctor could ask you where your pharmacy was then send them the prescription. Or if you don’t want to do that or don’t know where you are going you could get a bar code that basically contained a link to where to go in a db to look up your prescription info. Overall this would save incredible amounts of time as well as cut down on mistakes, fraud, and other similar problems.

I thought of this after waiting for several hours to get a prescription for my daughter and seeing how tedious the process was of people bringing in their prescriptions and the pharmacist having to call the doctors office and then fill the prescription. This same type of system could also be useful for insurance, but that is a whole different problem that also needs to be addressed.