Washington ? The push for paperless prescriptions is about to get a boost: Starting in January, doctors who e-prescribe can get bonus pay from Medicare.

For patients, the benefits are obvious — from shorter drugstore waits to increased safety, as pharmacists no longer squint to decipher doctors’ messy handwriting.

But persuading U.S. doctors to ditch their prescription pads for electronic prescribing so far has been a long, uphill battle. Only about 10 percent of doctors are taking the plunge like Dr. Ted Epperly in Boise, Idaho, who’s adopting the technology now.

Still, the movement is gaining steam as Medicare warns that its bonus payments are for a short time only: Holdouts still sticking to paper in 2012 will find their Medicare payments cut.

And continuing the push for medical information technology is a key part of President-elect Barack Obama’s health-reform plans, in hopes that moving to computerized records — not just prescriptions, but all those troublesome paper charts that contribute to medical errors and wasted care — ultimately could save millions of dollars a year.

“We’d never go back,” says Epperly, also president of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Patients “recognize that, ‘Hey, Dr. Epperly’s in the information age, and my safety is better and the quality of care is better.”‘

What’s a paperless prescription? When the doctor writes it by computer and sends it directly to the drugstore by computer, no little piece of paper to get lost or stolen anywhere along that trail.

Some doctors do write prescriptions via computer but then hand the patient a printout, or it arrives at the drugstore as a fax. Those don’t count as true electronic prescribing.

The biggest reason for the paperless push is to improve safety. More than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by medication mistakes.