Tennessee Blues plan launches online health records project

The $30 million initiative will make its members' medical records accessible to physicians over the Internet. First up: patients enrolled through the financially troubled TennCare.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 23/30, 2005.

In what it says is an effort to improve care, increase patient safety and reduce costs, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee in May rolled out a multimillion dollar initiative to make medical records of all its members available to physicians online. That includes patients enrolled through the state of Tennessee's troubled Medicaid alternative, TennCare.

Under its Community Connection initiative, the insurer mined and stored clinically relevant information from health care claims in a database. Physicians can access it securely over the Internet while their patients are in their offices.

That database will help the health plan improve care and reduce costs by giving physicians access to information about patient care that occurred in other physician offices or hospitals, said Jana Skewes, president and CEO of Shared Health, a for-profit company that the plan created recently.

"What we've done is taken claims data and built a database with data that is meaningful to clinicians at the point of care," Skewes said.

For example, physicians who sign up for the service, which is free, will be able to access test results, medications, hospital visits and emergency department visits. They also will be able to see whether patients are complying with drug regimens, based on the frequency patients refill prescriptions, and can avoid ordering duplicate tests and adverse drug events because they will know what other doctors have ordered. They also will be better able to spot patients seeking to acquire narcotics illegally.