Capital BlueCross, of Harrisburg, Pa. has announced a three-year renewal agreement with McLean, Va-based Prematics, Inc. for their electronic prescribing service. More than 1,000 practitioners who provide care for a million patients across central Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley use the service.
"Using Prematics electronic prescribing service offers a substantial economic and convenience benefit for our providers," said William Lehr, Jr., president and CEO of Capital BlueCross. "Prematics's service increases prescribing safety and improves formulary compliance."
Prematics signed the initial agreement with Capital BlueCross in 2007, and the renewal will bring their partnership through 2013. "Prematics has been with Capital BlueCross since their inception, helping us provide a positive experience for our practitioners, connecting us with doctors inside the exam room, and creating an ideal place to enhance the physician-patient dialogue," said Lehr.
Maintaining strong relationships with high-prescribing physicians is important for health plans to help reduce costs while also improving care. More than 80 percent of prescriptions in the United States are written by 30 percent of physicians, mainly primary care doctors in solo practice or small groups, and Prematics e-prescribing technology focuses on such small- to mid-sized practices.
Each physician is provided with wireless infrastructure and intuitive handheld mobile devices that perform basic e-prescribing functions and connect docs with clinical information on their patients.
Built on Prematics's highly intuitive electronic prescribing service and using the same mobile device to deliver additional vital care messages, the Prematics "Care Communication" service integrates with the doctor's workflow, enabling physicians to receive proactive, integrated real-time messages to support medication management, gaps in care closure, and timely care coordination.
More and more health plans are discovering that the real value of electronic prescribing is two-fold.
First, "physicians are now able to manage a patient's medications in a much more comprehensive way because they now have access to a patient's entire medication history, across all doctors – not simply the prescriptions they themselves write," says Kevin Hutchinson, president and CEO of Prematics. "That way, they can tell if a patient is actually taking their medications as prescribed, which enables doctors to make a lot better and safer clinical decisions that improve quality, lower cost and lower risk."
Second, "health plans are now recognizing that e-prescribing gets them into the workflow of the physician's practice for the first time," says Hutchinson. "Whereas before they'd always tried to communicate with the physicians by letter, fax or phone about particular patients, now they have this real-time capability to communicate with doctors."
Moreover, he says, "now they have the capability, through our services, of laying on top of e-prescribing what we call Care Communications – where they can notify, in real time, a physician that their clinical protocols and their data analysis suggests that this patient might be overdue for a foot exam or for a mammogram."
Making this "two-way dialogue" possible, where a health plan can alert the doctor that a patient may be overdue for treatment, and the physician in turn can freely communicate with the payer, "supports our new direction toward pay-for- performance and accountable care," says Hutchinson.
This past year has been a "tipping point" for e-prescribing, as Harry Totonis, president of Alexandria, Va.-based Surescripts, said in March, upon the release of Surescripts' "National Progress Report on E-Prescribing" – which showed the number of e-prescriptions leaping from 68 million in 2008 to 191 million by the end of 2009. "This is an incredible success story," Totonis said. "The growth and success of e-prescribing is definitely a model."