Some Tennessee providers are beginning to adopt health IT to increase efficiency despite interoperability concerns, the Memphis Business Journal reports.
Hospitals tend to be a few years ahead of physician practices in adopting technology. For example, Baptist Memorial Health Care is investing $60 million for a McKesson electronic health record network, and Methodist Healthcare is investing a similar amount for a Cerner network.
The systems will allow physicians to create templates that contain the most common health conditions and their preferred treatments. Building the templates is time-consuming, but once the templates are created, most of the charting becomes a fill-in-the-blank exercise, according to the Business Journal. Medicare rules restrict the use of templates because federal legislators do not consider them to provide the highest level of care, the Memphis Business Journal reports.
Dr. Susan Murrmann-Price, co-founder of McDonald-Murrmann Women's Clinic, two years ago began an EHR service and is determined within three months to make the seven-physician practice completely paperless. The physicians practice at both Baptist and Methodist hospitals, but it is unclear if its Greenway Medical Technologies' EHR system will be able to connect with the McKesson and Cerner systems used at those facilities.
Methodist and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center both connect to North Mississippi Medical Center in Tupelo, Miss., and Jackson-Madison County General Hospital in Jackson, Miss., through a T1 line, which allows physicians to access digital images and notes through any computer with Internet access, the Memphis Business Journal reports.
Memphis Internal Medicine has launched an electronic prescription system. "All our prescriptions are done on the computer; we reconcile the insurance company the same way Walgreen's does," Practice Administrator Alyssa Chase said, adding, "The system remembers the patient so once you enter their name it recalls all their other meds and helps us track how much we are prescribing."
While McDonald-Murrmann soon will have a complete EHR system, the practice has not even considered adopting e-prescriptions (Shepard, Memphis Business Journals, 2/9).