eprescribing

HIMSS appears to be getting bigger and bigger. There are 23,500 people here and over 800 exhibitors, but segregation is the watchword. The big guys are downstairs in the main exhibit hall, while the smaller companies are in an upstairs gulag. Cerner has perhaps the most interesting approach, taking a huge space in the middle of the hall, but featuring its clients rather than itself. Several other big companies are hosting smaller ones, with Microsoft devoting seemingly all its space to …

For a preview of the kind of world which many health policy wonks in Washington want, just take a look in the direction of Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Intel, Cisco and Oracle announced an initiative that will encourage local physicians to adopt electronic health records and other health IT systems. The Silicon Valley Pay-for-Performance Consortium will award $150,000 annually to practices that excel in using technologies like electronic health records, ePrescribing and secure messaging to …

How ready is the nation's current prescribing infrastructure for the new technology of ePrescribing? The California HealthCare Foundation releases a new report on physical, financial and electronic underpinnings of the nation's current prescribing system, and how that infrastructure is being changed in preparation for ePrescribing. The report examines the development of a common infrastructure to support ePrescribing, headed by Surescripts and RxHub, which is rapidly improving …

The Medical Group Management Association is encouraging its member physicians to adopt ePrescribing, noting that the technology can increase patient satisfaction and reduce costs and improve efficiency. Patients like to know that "providers are on top of things," MGMA President William F. Jessee said in a webcast earlier this week. CMS is pushing for greater use of electronic communications between doctors and pharmacies as an integral element of Part D. Article

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will spend $6 million on a pilot project to test the effectiveness of ePrescribing technologies during the first year of Medicare Part D. SureScripts, partnering with Brown University and five other vendors, gets $2 million to evaluate the effectiveness of programs that encourage physicians to send prescription information electronically to pharmacies. Individuals pilots are set to move forward in Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New …

Allscripts will buy A4 Health Systems for roughly $272 million in cash and stock. A4 is best known for its Healthmatics EMR--originally developed by pharma company Glaxo--and its practice management system for small to medium-sized practices. It also has a strong presence in emergency department software. Allscripts has a solid EMR offering in the larger physician practice market, as well as a stand-alone ePrescribing application which is being promoted by several Blues plans.

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FierceHealthcare will be continuing to track the evolution of new technologies as they are adopted by healthcare organizations. Here are a few which, while not adopted much yet in America's hospitals and clinics, will see a great deal more prominence in 2006:

• Tracking technologies: A mix of active RFID, WiFi, UWB and infra-red technologies are for the first time enabling cost-effective tracking of people and equipment in hospitals. More hospitals will …

As expected, HHS issued new rules designed to encourage electronic medical records and e-prescribing yesterday. CMS will be announcing a foundation standard for ePrescribing and provide $6 million in funding for e-prescribing pilots using that standard. The new Medicare Part D will not, however, require the use of ePrescribing, and some industry participants are unhappy that those standards will only apply to transactions in that program and not all ePrescribing. In addition, CMS …

The government is launching an ambitious five-year project which will look at ways to improve healthcare quality using pay-for-performance techniques. The Medicare Health Care Quality Demonstration will fund local and regional projects which use incentives to promote quality. CMS issued a request for proposals on Monday.

CMS administrator Dr. Mark McClellan also said his agency will shortly be releasing a call for proposals for e-prescribing demonstration projects that would test …

Two surveys out confirm that patients believe that EMRs may be useful and that more doctors are using handhelds for ePrescribing. Accenture's survey suggests that huge majorities of consumers believe that EMRs can increase care quality, reduce medical errors, and even reduce healthcare costs. More than half said that they thought EMRs were more secure than paper records. Fifty-two percent even said they were willing to pay $5 per month for an EMR, although that test has yet to succeed in …