Healthcare IT News - April 2008 - (Page 19)

www.HealthcareITNews.com PHYSICIAN PRACTICES & AmBULATORY CARE April 2008 ■ Healthcare IT News 19 aleRT Continued from page 17 Connecticut physicians use registry to raise P4P dollars By RICHaRd PIzzI, Associate Editor “Relying on paper-based U.S. mail and weeks of delay to deliver time-urgent patient safety alerts to doctors in 2008 is indefensible and unsafe,” said Nancy Dickey, MD, former American Medical Association president and chair of the iHealth Alliance, the not-forprofit board that governs HCNN. “We are finally moving from the paper age into the internet age in terms of patient safety alerts.” Dickey said online enrollment would require only “two minutes” of a physician’s time, and the benefits would be immediate. She said HCNN would ensure rapid delivery of alerts to physicians, and would lead to improvements in patient safety and office efficiency. San Francisco-based Medem, Inc., will provide network operations for HCNN. The mission of the iHealth Alliance, which governs HCNN, is to protect the interests of patients and providers as healthcare moves online. The iHealth Alliance board credited FDA leadership for making the HCNN a reality, as the FDA recently updated its guidance for the pharmaceutical and device industry, and now actively encourages the use of online networks for patient safety alerts. HCNN organizers noted that surveys of practicing physicians reveal that more than 90 percent of physicians want drug safety alerts sent online instead of in paper via U.S. mail. “Letters to healthcare providers often are screened by one or more ‘gatekeepers’ and may not reach the intended recipients,” said Janet Woodcock, MD, acting director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at FDA. “Gatekeepers often discard these important paper-based alerts as ‘junk mail.’” Manufacturers that will use the new online network are funding HCNN, and currently pay for U.S. mail delivery of paper-based alerts. Johnson & Johnson and the pharmaceutical industry group PhRMA have been industry leaders on the project. Numerous health plans have also participated in the HCNN effort, including Aetna and Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), the parent company of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, Illinois, Oklahoma and New Mexico. Paul Handel, MD, chief medical officer of HCSC, said his company was “aggressively reaching out” to its physicians to encourage their enrollment in the HCNN. Registration on HCNN is available immediately for U.S. physicians at www.hcnn.net, and organizers say tens of thousands of physicians have already enrolled as a result of outreach efforts from liability carriers. ■ More at – Middlesex Professional Services, Inc., one of Connecticut’s largest multispecialty independent physician associations, uses a patient registry to boost reimbursement under a pay-for-performance program. MPS, a 300-physician IPA, eschewed electronic medical record technology to collect and MIDDLETOWN, CT report data, relying instead on a Web-based patient registry with decision support tools at the point-of-care. In 2006, MPS primary care physicians in eight separate practices implemented a Web-based registry from Raleigh, N.C.-based DocSite, with the intention of participating in the Anthem Quality Insights Primary Care Physician Quality Incentive Program. MPS officials say their providers met or exceeded AQI baseline measures 100 percent of the time, and exceeded or met goal measures 93 percent of the time. Additionally, each participating physician reported increases in annual income ranging from $6,000 to $10,000. “[Our] physicians made a minimal investment in technology to achieve these results and suffered few disruptions in their practice workflow,” said Douglas Arnold, executive director of MPS. “Conservatively speaking, they achieved a return on investment exceeding 700 percent in just the first year.” More at HealthcareITNews.com e ●Connect: MPS 0408 HealthcareITNews.com e ● Connect: allSCrIPtS 0408 e ●Connect: alert 0408 http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9004 http://allscripts.com/red http://www.hcnn.net http://allscripts.com/red http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9002 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/eConnect.cms?id=9021

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Healthcare IT News - April 2008 Contents New Media Push Stepping Down BI Headaches Decision Grants Safety Alerts Summit 08 Growing an EHR Year 24

Healthcare IT News - April 2008

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