Pharmacy benefit firms to push electronic prescriptions

Computerworld - In an effort to get doctors to prescribe more medicine electronically, three leading pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) have announced plans to pour $60 million into the creation of an electronic exchange linking physicians, pharmacies, PBMs and health plans.

Merck-Medco Managed Care LLC in Franklin Lakes, N.J., St. Louis-based Express Scripts Inc. and AdvancePCS in Irving, Texas, will form RxHub LLC. The members expect the exchange to be up and running by the end of this year or early next year. Jon Halbert, vice chairman of e-business and technology at AdvancePCS, said the trio hopes to have 25,000 physicians signed up by the end of next year.

The PBMs are "collaborating in improving the overall efficiency of [prescription-writing]," said Stephen Cohan, senior vice president of business development at Merck-Medco.

The companies hope to reduce the number of medical mistakes that are the result of prescription-writing errors. Members cited an Institute of Medicine report that indicated that prescription errors kill as many as 7,000 Americans a year and cost the health care industry more than $77 billion a year.

Through the exchange, physicians would be able to use electronic prescribing software on handheld devices or a physician management system to link directly to pharmacies, PBMs and health plans. Cohan said the exchange would attract physicians by offering them real-time access to patient benefit information.

Reducing medical errors has been the subject of widespread discussion in the health care industry since the Washington-based Institute of Medicine released a study in December 1999 that said medical errors cause as many as 98,000 deaths a year.

Other companies have taken similar initiatives. Last month, General Motors Corp. announced a three-year effort to offer handhelds to physicians who treat its employees and dependents (see story).

And the Leapfrog Group, a consortium of 60 Fortune 500 companies -- including GM and The Dow Chemical Co. -- will encourage hospitals to use certain technologies in an effort to improve patient safety standards.