More than a third of prescriptions now electronic

Doctors increasingly are ditching the prescription pad: More than a third of the nation's prescriptions now are electronic, according to the latest count. The government has been pushing doctors to e-prescribe, in part because it can be safer for patients. This year, holdouts will start to see cuts in their Medicare payments. Thursday's report from Surescripts, the largest network for paperless prescribing, shows more doctors are signing up fast. At the end of 2011, 36 percent of all prescriptions were electronic—the doctor wrote it by computer and sent it directly to the pharmacy with the push of a button, the report found. That's up from 22 percent of prescriptions that were paperless a year earlier.