Iowa’s largest integrated healthcare system announced Monday a new initiative, called ePrescribe Iowa, aimed at getting physicians to switch from paper prescriptions to electronic ones.
A new partnership between the Iowa Health System and Chicago-based Allscripts-Misys Healthcare Solutions will offer a free Web-based e-prescribing solution to physicians throughout Iowa and western Illinois. Allscripts has a similar initiative in Florida, where it partnered with USF Health on a 10-county, 8,000-physician e-prescribing pilot called Paper-Free Tampa.
One of the goals of both projects is to reduce the number of paper prescriptions, which have been known to cause sometimes deadly medical errors. According to an Institute of Medicine study, 1.5 million Americans are injured each year and 7,000 die from preventable medication errors.
“Physicians understand that the electronic health revolution is upon us and we must change our old habits of practicing medicine on paper,” said Joel Waymire, MD, of Walnut Creek Pediatrics. “Electronic prescribing is an easy fix for our current system of handwritten prescriptions that are hand-delivered to the pharmacy and a relatively easy first step to adopting a full electronic health record.”
Bill Leaver, president and CEO of the Iowa Health System, said: “Writing prescriptions electronically is a key means of enhancing the quality and safety of patient care, and Iowa Health System is proud to offer the first program to provide this life-saving technology to every Iowa physician at no cost, along with the connectivity needed to make it work in the most remote rural facilities.”
Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman said, “Iowa Health System has created a model for the entire nation to help physicians quickly and easily transition from paper-based care to electronic health records and in so doing take advantage of federal incentives for their adoption.”
The Iowa Health System currently has 559 physicians in 117 clinics using Allscripts as their EHR.
E-prescribing a critical factor for physicians to qualify for incentive payments provided under the federal stimulus package. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will pay physicians between $44,000 and $64,000 over five years, beginning in 2011, for deploying and using a certified EHR to care for patients. ePrescribe Iowa can serve as an on-ramp to a full EHR. In addition, federal law already provides approximately $3,500 in annual financial incentives for doctors who e-prescribe and will impose penalties on those who do not e-prescribe by 2012.
Four percent of all prescriptions written in Iowa are produced using e-prescribing software and delivered electronically to pharmacies, according to SureScripts, a company that connects prescribers in all 50 states to pharmacies and the nation’s payers.
ePrescribe Iowa is a component of HealthNet connect, the Iowa Health System’s 3,200-mile fiber optic network that stretches from Denver to Chicago. It's a first step toward a larger goal of implementing connected electronic health records.
“By combining the information-sharing capabilities of HealthNet connect with free e-prescribing to enhance patient care and safety, Iowa Health System and Allscripts are taking an important step toward realizing President Obama’s vision of an interconnected healthcare system,” said Iowa State Sen. Jack Hatch, (D-Des Moines).
ePrescribe Iowa automates the process of writing prescriptions and transmitting them to pharmacies while alerting physicians to potentially dangerous drug-to-drug interactions, drug allergies, dosage errors and other problems that can occur when writing prescriptions on paper.
The standalone solution provided by the Iowa Health System and Allscripts also gives physicians a way to transition from paper medical records to a full electronic health record through software that automates everyday clinical tasks such as e-prescribing and connects physician practices with other key healthcare stakeholders including insurance companies, laboratories and hospitals.
