Horizon Healthcare Services, Allscripts to promote e-Prescribing and EHR

Allscripts Healthcare Solutions recently announced a relationship with Horizon Healthcare Services Inc., New Jersey's largest health insurer. This relationship is the beginning of an initiative to encourage physicians based in New Jersey to use electronic prescribing looking towards full clinical automation, according to a release.

Over the next two years, Allscripts will target hundreds of physicians within the Horizon network to offer the Allscripts' TouchScript e-prescribing solution.  Horizon, as part of its Horizon Health Connect $5 million technology initiative, will provide selected physicians with Allscripts software, wireless network components from Cisco Systems, handheld Pocket PC devices from Hewlett Packard and high-speed Internet connections, all at no cost. 

Based on the results of this initiative, Horizon hopes that additional physicians will implement TouchScript and, or possibly, implement the entire TouchChart Electronic Health Record (HER).
 
The benefit to Horizon physicians is the potential ability to quickly create and send prescriptions from the exam room directly to the patient's pharmacy using a laptop, desktop computer or wireless Pocket PC or Table PC device.  Hopefully there will be an increase in patient safety, a reduction in errors, less need for consuming pharmacy callbacks to physicians, and overall improved office efficiency. 

TouchScript will connect Horizon physicians to a single, integrated network that includes patients, pharmacies and payers, providing a more seamless and efficient patient experience.

Around the web

RBMA President Peter Moffatt discusses some of the biggest obstacles facing the specialty in the new year. 

Deepak Bhatt, MD, director of the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital and principal investigator of the TRANSFORM trial, explains an emerging technique for cardiac screening: combining coronary CT angiography with artificial intelligence for plaque analysis to create an approach similar to mammography.

A total of 16 cardiology practices from 12 states settled with the DOJ to resolve allegations they overbilled Medicare for imaging agents used to diagnose cardiovascular disease.