Health insurer offering free electronic health records to doctors in four states

Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans in four states are integrating the medical data of more than 11 million people into a single electronic health record (EHR) system in an effort to eliminate unnecessary treatments and to encourage preventive care.

The Health Care Service Corp., which runs Blue Cross and Blue Shield operations in Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, has been working for two years to merge the plans' various IT systems that contain data about eligibility, medication, lab visits, hospitalization and physician office visits into a single system. The Chicago-based company plans to provide its patients and doctors with free access to the integrated system.

The move by HCSC is a new twist on a national effort to shepherd the adoption of EHRs, which various government agencies are recommending in hopes of decreasing medical errors and bolstering the quality of patient care by replacing current disjointed paper records with a comprehensive electronic patient record.

To date, the effort has focused primarily on encouraging doctors and hospitals to install EHR technology. Many physicians, however, have balked at undertaking such projects because of their often hefty installation and maintenance costs. Physicians have also complained that even though they're the ones who pay those expenses, it's the insurance plans that receive the lion's share of the financial rewards in the form of lower costs.

As the different insurance plans bring the service online through the rest of this year, HCSC will offer physicians and clients free access to the service, said Joe Taylor, vice president of enterprise business processes. Taylor detailed the effort Monday at the World Health Care Congress in Washington.

The HCSC system uses MeDecision Inc.'s Patient Clinical Summary software, which creates an EHR by gathering patient data from various sources, analyzing the data and applying analytics and rules to identify possible options for treating patients, Taylor said. Doctors can access the data with an Internet connection.

"We're trying to take this data and empower it with some analytics to provide a more meaningful office visit between the member and their selected physician," Taylor added. "Think about a health insurance company that is providing information to the physician saying, 'We want you to do this test.' There is a chance to do more prevention and more wellness [efforts] and to see a potential treatment opportunity and act on it."

He noted that the system could use analytics and rules-based software to, for example, remind a patient and physician that an annual mammogram needs to be scheduled or send an alert when different physicians write a patient prescriptions for medications that can't be used together.