CHICAGO and FLINT, MI – February 22, 2010 – Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) announced today that McLaren Medical Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of McLaren Health Care Corporation, based in Flint, Mich., selected the Allscripts Electronic Health Record (EHR) for 150 employed physicians in an agreement valued in excess of $3 million.
McLaren Health Care Corporation, which operates in 29 Michigan counties, has been ranked in the top 25 integrated health care systems in the United States for the last 10 years by Managed Healthcare Executive magazine. McLaren Medical Group operates the practices of 150 primary care physicians, including family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and occupational medicine/urgent care.
“Our choice of the Allscripts Electronic Health Record will reduce the potential for medical errors and also will increase the efficiency of our physicians and our offices as a whole,” said Don Kooy, Chief Executive Officer of the McLaren Regional Medical Center and Chief Information Officer of McLaren Health Care Corporation. “In addition, using an Electronic Health Record and its advanced reporting tools will help us earn federal incentives.”
McLaren is a leading-edge medical group with its own in-house IT provider, PHNS. PHNS was co-founded at McLaren, and is a nationally acclaimed information technology firm. Aside from the Electronic Health Record, McLaren Medical Group is investing in fiber-optic cabling, portable digital communication workstations, wireless networks, and data transfer systems to make its practices among the most technically advanced in the state.
McLaren plans to surround the deployment of the Electronic Health Record with a number of innovative solutions that are designed to make it easy for physicians to use – critical because the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides significant financial incentives for the “meaningful use” of an EHR – through simplified reporting and enhanced patient identification and communication. For example, McLaren Medical Group will use Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software from Nuance to enable physicians to “talk directly” into the EHR, while at the same time allowing them to enter discrete data elements and navigate the software. This not only helps physicians bridge the EHR adoption curve, but also provides a strong return on investment versus traditional transcription.
McLaren will also deploy the Allscripts Clinical Quality Solution (CQS), which draws data from the Electronic Health Record to automate the quality reporting requirements of most government and payer-funded “pay-for-performance” programs. CQS also delivers real-time clinical decision support information to physicians at the point of care, which promotes high quality patient care.
In order to facilitate use and avoid duplicate files or missing information in any file, McLaren has also engaged Initiate Systems to build an enterprise master person index (EMPI) that will create complete, highly accurate and real-time views of patient data spread across multiple systems and databases. This will allow each McLaren patient to have one comprehensive record, no matter how many providers they may see within the organization.
“We have invested in providing our physicians the best Electronic Health Record on the market,” said Margaret Dimond, President and Chief Executive Officer of McLaren Medical Group. “Leading-edge technology like the Dragon voice recognition and automated quality reporting will help us improve quality and better manage costs for our patients.”
McLaren Medical Group chose to implement an Electronic Health Record now in order to be eligible for incentive payments of between $44,000 and $64,000 per physician that first become available from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) in 2011. Under provisions of ARRA, CMS will pay the incentives to physicians who adopt and demonstrate “meaningful use” of an EHR. McLaren Medical Group will use the EHR to automate the quality reporting requirements of government and payer-funded “pay-for-performance” programs.
