CHICAGO and JOHNSON CITY, TN – January 6, 2010 – Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) announced today that Mountain States Health Alliance (MSHA) has selected the Allscripts Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) solutions for 300 employed and affiliated physicians and mid-level providers to enhance the quality of patient care, improve patient communications, and better manage the cost of care delivery.
Mountain States Health Alliance provides comprehensive care to people across 29 counties in Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina. MSHA’s integrated delivery system includes 14 hospitals, 21 primary care centers, and 231 employed physicians in 75 offices managed by Blue Ridge Medical Management Corporation, a wholly-owned MSHA subsidiary.
“The Electronic Health Record is a critical initiative for our organization because it enables us to bring the future of healthcare to patients in our region,” said Steve Kilgore, President of Blue Ridge. “Allscripts gives our providers the ability to connect to one another and to other providers throughout the region, leading to further integration, better coordination of care, and ultimately improved outcomes for our patients.”
All Blue Ridge physicians, physician assistants and nurse practitioners will receive the Allscripts solutions, enabling Blue Ridge to join a connected community of caregivers, quickly sharing data for enhanced patient care across the community.
MSHA also will provide the Allscripts Electronic Health Record at a subsidized rate for the 70 physicians of ETSU Physicians and Associates, the group practice of the James H. Quillen College of Medicine at East Tennessee State University (ETSU). In providing Allscripts for ETSU’s physicians, MSHA is taking advantage of recent changes to the federal Stark regulations that now allow hospitals to provide assistance to non-employed physicians in purchasing healthcare information technology.
Allscripts will interface the Electronic Health Record with MSHA’s Siemens Soarian® hospital information system, enabling Blue Ridge and ETSU physicians to share up-to-date information on hospitalized patients back and forth with hospital providers. Physicians in all MSHA settings will have access to patient information including lab orders and test results, medications, problem lists, allergies and hospital discharge summaries.
Richard Eshbach, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of MSHA, said the health system also plans to connect its Electronic Health Record and inpatient systems to CareSpark, a non-profit regional health information exchange, to connect electronically with regional physicians using technology from other vendors.
Eshbach said MSHA selected Allscripts following an exhaustive review of other products on the market, in part because the health system was already using the Allscripts Vision™ practice management system. “This is a long-term commitment and partnership and we wanted someone who had advanced EHR functionality like Allscripts Enterprise, someone who shared our vision for health information exchange and clinical integration, plus real staying power in the market. That’s what we saw with Allscripts.”
MSHA currently uses the Allscripts Homecare solution to automate and connect Mountain States HomeCare & Hospice’s 240 providers. “Our goal is to integrate and share information back and forth between the home care, hospital and physician office settings for full clinical integration and improved patient care,” said Eshbach.
As part of the Electronic Health Record deployment, MSHA will deploy the Allscripts Clinical Quality Solution (CQS), which draws data from the EHR and practice management system to automate the quality reporting requirements of government and payer-funded “pay-for-performance” programs. CQS also delivers real-time clinical decision support information to improve the quality of patient care through proactive management of chronic diseases.
