Allscripts: The heart of healthcare

Most companies claim to be the leaders in their space. For Allscripts, leadership comes down to just one thing - delivering solutions so good they become indispensable.

"We take pride in consistently raising our technology and our clients to the next level," says Glen Tullman, Chief Executive Officer of Chicago-based Allscripts, which ranked 21st on this year's Healthcare Informatics Top 100 listing (up from No. 34 in 2006). "The key is to deliver solutions that are so useful, so transformative, that our clients not only need to use them but they want to use them."

More than 30,000 physicians in over 3,500 clinics nationwide use Allscripts technology to inform, connect and transform healthcare. The company's award-winning information and connectivity solutions include Electronic Health Records, practice management, e-Prescribing, and document imaging solutions for the ambulatory market, and emergency department and care management systems for hospitals.

As an industry innovator, Allscripts offers more than just tools to automate and streamline everyday clinical tasks. The company's solutions reach beyond and between isolated information silos, connecting the entire community of care, informing caregivers with every relevant piece of clinical information. At Allscripts, connectivity is more than a buzzword. It is a primary means of fulfilling the company's vision of transforming healthcare. Allscripts connects physicians to patients, pharmacies, labs, and to all stakeholders in the healthcare delivery system. As a result, the company is turning healthcare "red" by delivering solutions that inform physicians with Just Right, Just-In-Time Informationâ¢, connect them to each other and to the entire community of care, and transform healthcare by making what some call impossible, possible.

"After deploying the Allscripts Electronic Health Record, we've seen not only improvements in care and reductions in cost, but a whole spectrum of new opportunities," says Stephen Badger, Chief Executive Officer of The George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates (MFA), the largest multi-specialty physician group in Washington, DC and a national leader in the adoption of information technology. "This has been a home run. We've transformed our practice and it would not have been possible without Allscripts."

Among many other awards and accolades bestowed upon Allscripts, the company's HealthMatics® and TouchWorksâ¢ Electronic Health Records were both rated No. 1 in their market categories by the prestigious KLAS Top 20: 2007 Mid-Year Report. The KLAS reports are closely watched industry measures of product and service performance and are considered especially important because they are generated by in-depth interviews with thousands of actual end-users.

But Allscripts success is based on more than awards and numbers. The company's strong vision and commitment to improving healthcare is reflected in direct action that, again and again, ends up leading the market in significant ways. Early this year, for example, Allscripts teamed with Dell and a host of the nation's leading technology and healthcare companies to launch the National ePrescribing Patient Safety InitiativeSM (NEPSISM), a $100 million consortium that is providing electronic prescribing software free to every physician in America. The NEPSI initiative (http://www.nationaleRx.com) captures the heart of what truly motivates Allscripts and its charismatic leader, Glen Tullman: "The opportunity to make a difference and to tackle a big problem — that's what gets me excited," Tullman says.

And make a difference it does. By connecting clients to real-time clinical information on a scale never before imagined, Allscripts opens the door to important new financial and care-enhancement opportunities, including clinical trials (Holston Medical Group earns $3 million per year through clinical trial participation); Pay-for-Performance (Brown & Toland Medical Group earned $1.2 million in bonuses in one year alone); Return on Investment (North Fulton Family Medicine's 11 physicians recorded $2.6 million in annual savings); Length of Stay Reductions (Good Samaritan Hospital in Baltimore saw a 40 percent reduction in LOS after identifying patients as not meeting criteria); and Emergency Department savings (Mt. Carmel St. Ann's Hospital saw a $2.7 million increase in physician reimbursement).

Most important, these new opportunities and cost savings have led to higher quality care delivered more cost effectively, representing a real transformation in healthcare. In the end, that is what makes Allscripts truly indispensable.