Continuing its high-profile effort to push the adoption of electronic health records among physicians, Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions has announced yet another reseller agreement with a key distributor of IT products to practices.
Allscripts announced a strategic partnership late Thursday with Henry Schein Medical Systems, a Melville, N.Y.-based distributor with more than 575,000 customers worldwide. Under the agreement, Henry Schein’s sales force of 625 field and telesales representatives will market Allscripts’ Professional Electronic Health Record to office-based practicioners around the country.
“Our mission is to help our customers succeed by offering the technology needed to operate an efficient practice and deliver high-quality healthcare, and Allscripts is the market leader and the ideal partner,” said Stanley M. Bergman, chairman and chief executive officer of Henry Schein. “Given that the federal government is providing significant financial incentives for physicians to adopt electronic health records, we expect that many of our physician customers will be looking for a quality solution and we are proud to represent Allscripts. We are also excited about being the only national representative of Allscripts’ Professional Electronic Health Record solution.”
The partnership comes one month after Allscripts signed a similar deal with Cardinal Health of Dublin, Ohio, setting up a distribution network for its MyWay EHR for solo and small-practice physicians. Those deals and the creation of the Allscripts Distribution Network (ADN) represent a new attempt at reaching office-based physicians - especially the one- to three-physician market, which numbers more than 160,000 medical groups in the United States. Recent surveys indicate only 5 percent of this market has adopted EHRs.
The deals are also driven in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009, enacted by President Barack Obama on Feb. 17 as a means of spurring healthcare IT adoption. The law provides incentives of between $44,000 and $64,000 for five years, beginning in 2011, for physicians who deploy and demonstrate “meaningful use” of certified EHRs (the definition of “meaningful use” is currently being decided by the Department of Health and Human Services). Included in ARRA is a deduction in Medicare reimbursements of as much as 3 percent if a physician hasn’t adopted an EHR by 2015.
A survey of 1,888 healthcare professionals, recently undertaken by Allscripts, indicated 98 percent would take advantage of the incentives or would be “closely evaluating the opportunity.”
“As physicians move to take advantage of the stimulus incentives and quickly select an electronic health record, who better to trust with this critical decision than Henry Schein, a company they already rely on for all of their practice needs,” said Glen Tullman, Allscripts’ CEO. “We’re proud to be able to help usher Henry Schein’s clients into the information-based healthcare system of the future with an electronic health record that has the depth and breadth they need to deliver high quality care cost effectively.”
