The Health and Human Services has announced that certain bonuses will be given to doctors who will start prescribing medicine over the Internet. The moves comes as part of a campaign aimed at reducing the cost and increasing the quality of health services nationwide.

According to the Health and Human Services Secretary, doctors who will start using the electronic service will get a 2 percent increase in their wages over the years 2009 and 2010. The increase will drop to 1 percent in 2011 and 2012, while in 2013 doctors' wages will be up only 0.5 percent. The program is designed to encourage doctors to make the transition to e-prescribing as soon as possible.

Even though prescribing medicine over the Internet is still optional, HHS plans to make it compulsory in the near future. The federal department said that starting with 2012 the doctors who haven't made the transition will see their payments dropping with 1 percent that year, the measure becoming even more drastic in 2013, when the drop will be of 1.5 percent and will reach its peak in 2014, when doctors will get 2 percent less money if they will continue to prescribe medicine the traditional way.

The main reason for which the government has decide to introduce this incentives, is the fact that a lot of patients suffer as a result of taking the wrong medicines because the pharmacists haven't understood the doctors' handwriting. What is more, it seems that over 150 million phone calls are made by pharmacists to doctors each year to clarify what medicine and in what quantity they should give to a patient.

E-prescribing takes care of all of these problems, and offers some new benefits too. Using the system, doctors will not be able to prescribe medicine to their patience, but will also have access to their medical history, reducing the risk of giving the patient something that would interact with another medicine he or she is taking or that the patient is allergic to.

Good as it may sound, doctors who plan to switch to the new system will have to scoop an initial $3000 on hardware and software, and will also have to pay $80 to $400 each month on maintenance.