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Blues plan offers EMR access to members, doctors

The system will provide medical and prescribing history to physicians at no cost, but on a read-only basis.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan — Posted May 14, 2007

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Health Care Service Corp., a BlueCross BlueShield plan operator, said it is integrating the medical information of more than 11 million members of its plans in Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas into a single electronic health record that will be available, free of charge, to plan members and their physicians.

Chicago-based HCSC will allow physicians access to online records, given that many practices have been unable to acquire them due to cost or other reasons. The company is calling the system an EHR, though it is essentially the same thing as a more common term, the electronic medical record, or EMR.

However, the system is limited in that physicians are only able to view the records. They are unable to contribute to them.

The system, two years in the making, was launched last year in New Mexico and Oklahoma and earlier this year in Illinois. It will go live in Texas sometime this summer. The records will include claims data, a medication history and a list of hospitalizations and treatments.

William E. Gerardi, MD, clinical adviser for managed health care delivery for HCSC, said this is the first-known EHR system to allow access to physicians, patients and payers. Most Blues plans do offer free, online personal health records for members.

Cost control and access

Dr. Gerardi said he believes the efficiencies gained by the system will allow HCSC to control costs and make insurance affordable to more people. "One goal as an organization is to decrease the ranks of the uninsured, and one way we are able to do this is decrease some of the inefficiencies in the health care arena," he said.

Rodney Osborn, MD, president of the Illinois State Medical Society, said he knows nothing about the system, because HCSC did not consult with the society before or after implementing it, but he is impressed that they are helping the physicians get a system since many small practices simply cannot afford them.

"But I will say that we do prefer the payers help physicians in terms of the purchase of the electronic health record systems because the insurers stand to benefit greatly from physician EHR adoption," said Dr. Osborn, a Peoria anesthesiologist. Additionally, "EHR data really needs to be kept and entered by the physician."

But Dr. Gerardi said this system will be of great benefit to doctors as well as to HCSC.

"We are providing information at the point of care, information they [doctors] won't necessarily have," he said.

"I'm not saying it's complete information, but it's pretty good."

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