CHICAGO and VENTURA, CA – December 9, 2009 – Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) announced today that Community Memorial Health System has selected the Allscripts Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) solution, with Allscripts Revenue Cycle Management, to enhance the quality of care, improve patient communications, and better manage the cost of care delivery. The solutions form a key component of Community Memorial’s connected healthcare strategy, which enables health information exchange and collaboration among all the members of a patient’s care team, inside and outside the health system.
“With Allscripts, the Electronic Health Record has finally become so user friendly that it has tipped the scale from being a burden to becoming a benefit,” said Stanley Frochtzwajg, M.D, Chief Medical Officer of Community Memorial Health System. “National quality measures and the reimbursement tied to those measures are impacting physicians and hospitals alike. The only real way to comply with those measures and compete successfully with other health systems is by collecting and collating that data with an EHR.”
Established in 2005 by the merger of the 240-bed Community Memorial Hospital and the 103-bed Ojai Valley Community Hospital, Community Memorial Health System is a not-for-profit organization that includes the two hospitals and nine Centers for Family Health in communities across Ventura County.
Community Memorial Health System will host the Allscripts solutions for 70 contracted physicians in its nine clinics, along with a pilot group of 12 community physicians, before offering it to other affiliated physicians within the community. In providing Allscripts for all of its affiliated physicians, Community Memorial Health System 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.
Community Memorial physicians will be able to use the Electronic Health Record to access a “virtual patient record” that aggregates and harmonizes clinical information about a patient from all the information systems in use across the health system. This interoperability platform from dbMotion accomplishes the goal of one patient record, bridging gaps that often exist between hospital-based and office-based care and enabling physicians to access a comprehensive view of all data available about a patient.
Community Memorial also will deploy the Allscripts Clinical Quality Solution (CQS), which draws data from the Electronic Health Record and Practice Management system to automate the quality reporting requirements of government and payer-funded “pay-for-performance” programs. CQS, provided by Allscripts in partnership with TeamPraxis, also delivers real-time clinical decision support information to improve the quality of patient care.
Federal EHR Incentives Provided Urgency
Community Memorial acted 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, said Dr. Frochtzwajg.
Under provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), CMS will pay the incentives over five years to physicians who adopt and demonstrate “meaningful use” of an EHR.
“The time table for the federal reimbursements begins very soon, and in order for us to safely meet that deadline we realized we must begin our implementation now,” Dr. Frochtzwajg said.
