News in brief - June 21, 2004

New Minn. law protects physicians - Physician incentive program expands - Panel concocts e-prescribing recipe - Tenet sells hospital in Spain

New Minn. law protects physicians

The Minnesota Legislature has passed a law that provides protections to hospitals and doctors who sign contracts with managed care plans.

The Minnesota Health Plan Contracting Act, signed into law in May by Gov. Tim Pawlenty, was supported by the Minnesota Medical Assn. and county medical associations.

It requires that plans give copies of contracts to physicians, including attachments and amendments, before they are signed.

The act also provides that payers automatically pay interest to doctors on late claims, ending the requirement that additional bills be submitted to insurers, and prohibits plans from adding new commercial insurance products without getting a doctor's consent.

Physician incentive program expands

Bridges to Excellence, the employer-sponsored effort to reward physicians for providing high-quality care, has expanded to include a new city and to make one bonus initiative more comprehensive.

In addition to rewarding doctors for quality care in Boston, Cincinnati and Louisville, Ky., the program will also recognize physicians in the Albany, N.Y., area.

It also has expanded and tweaked its Physician Office Link program, which offers an annual bonus for adopting information technology systems that help manage patient care.

Practices can earn up to $50 per patient by demonstrating that they have implemented certain electronic systems for managing care for all of their patients.

The project, which is sponsored by large employers such as General Electric, Verizon Communications and Ford Motor Co., also includes bonus payment initiatives for diabetes and cardiac care.

Panel concocts e-prescribing recipe

An expert panel assembled by Rand, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based think tank, has issued a report outlining about 60 recommendations for creating electronic prescribing systems suitable to meet the needs of office-based physicians.

Two-thirds of the recommendations were deemed to be achievable within the next three years while the remainder were not, according to "Recommendations for Comparing Electronic Prescribing Systems: Results of an Expert Consensus Process."

The report, which is designed to offer guidance to physicians seeking to buy e-prescribing systems and the software companies that design and sell them, was published last month on the Web site of Health Affairs. The expert panel's recommendations include:

Import patient identification and demographic data from electronic medical records.
Provide the patient's current medication list to prescribers who have care responsibility for the patient.
Display a list of medications appropriate to the diagnosis when it is entered.
Guard against efforts to promote specific drugs by third parties such as drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers.
Distinguish alerts based on patient safety and outcomes from those based on formulary adherence.
Transmit prescriptions using established standards for data exchange.
Support compliance with HIPAA privacy and security regulations.

The report and a supplement handicapping when each of the 60 recommendations could become commercially available can be accessed online (content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.w4.305v1).

Tenet sells hospital in Spain

Tenet Healthcare Corp. has pulled out of the international market by selling its only foreign hospital.

The troubled for-profit hospital chain announced May 28 that one of its subsidiaries had sold Centro Médico Teknon, a 257-bed acute care facility in Barcelona, Spain, to the British company BC Partners, Ltd.

Proceeds of the sale are expected to total about $50 million. In addition, BC Partners agreed to assume about $31 million in long-term debt and other liabilities.

Tenet is shedding dozens of hospitals as it tries to restructure following a year and a half of legal and financial woes. In January, the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company said it was divesting 27 hospitals to focus on 69 core facilities.

In other company news, Tenet said it had reached an agreement to continue operating MCP Hospital in Pennsylvania through July 30 while proposals about the hospital's fate are considered. Tenet previously had announced it would pull out of the hospital by the end of June.