DAYTON, OH – While e-prescribing initiatives are becoming more prevalent, the Anthem National Accounts pilot involving approximately 100 physicians in Dayton and Youngstown, Ohio eschews a health plan-only perspective.
With General Motors Corp., one of the largest purchasers of healthcare services in the country, participating, the pilot has a distinctive community focus, said Charles Kennedy, vice president of health information technology and research for WellPoint.
“Physicians who adopt the e-prescribing program in their practices will be able to use it for all patients, not just Anthem members or GM employees,” said Bruce Bradley, director of healthcare strategy and public policy for General Motors, in a press release by MedPlus, the designated e-prescribing service vendor owned by national laboratory Quest Diagnostics.
The partnership, said Kennedy, will test the hypothesis of whether an existing account management salesforce can leverage its infrastructure and relationships with physicians to expand its services to e-prescribing.
With physicians unable to use health information technology without service and support, the existing sales force can effectively and efficiently support physicians, he said.
“All HIT vendors we work with will be all-payer solutions that benefit all communities,” he said.
The pilot, which began in November, added its last group of physicians in January.
Sam Nussbaum, MD, executive vice president and CMO of WellPoint, said in the MedPlus announcement that the e-prescribing pilot is designed to encourage physician adoption. WellPoint is subsidizing the computer hardware and software that will provide physicians with real-time access to such information as health plan formularies and patient medication histories derived from claims data. Physicians will have the ability to electronically send prescriptions to retail and mail-order pharmacies in real time.
WellPoint will gather detailed information on potential quality of care and patient safety improvement.
“We need to understand how these alerts and warnings impact physician practice patterns,” Kennedy said. “We are keen on learning what the e-data-sharing vehicle capability is and test hypotheses on how effective drug interaction algorithms are and see what kinds of additional quality improvement and effectiveness we can see.”
Kennedy said WellPoint also is interested in MedPlus’ ability to integrate multiple datasets and enable physicians to see lab data from Quest Diagnostics.
“The more comprehensive data you have, the more benefit you provide,” he said.