Companies to fund new push for e-prescribing

A business coalition is offering a free electronic prescribing service to all physicians. But such initiatives have had trouble catching fire in the past.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Feb. 5, 2007.

A national coalition of large technology companies, employers and health plans is putting up more than $100 million to give a free Web-based electronic prescribing system to every physician in the country during the next five years, the most prominent effort yet to get doctors to adopt the technology.

Allscripts LLC, Dell Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Sprint Nextel Corp. are among a dozen companies that have joined the coalition and agreed to contribute money or in-kind contributions or both. Participants also include WellPoint Inc., Aetna Inc. and Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Those insurers have committed to offer financial incentives to encourage doctors to implement e-prescribing technology or use it to achieve certain pay-for-performance measures such as a certain generic prescription utilization level, Allscripts' CEO Glen Tullman said at Jan. 16 press conference in Washington D.C.

The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) has commitments for a majority of the $100 million and is talking with other large health plans and employers to obtain the remainder, Tullman said in a telephone interview with AMNews. None of the participants will make money off of NEPSI, he said.

However, he and representatives of Microsoft and Dell acknowledged at the news conference that they could reap a financial benefit in the long run if doctors upgrade from electronic prescribing to electronic medical records systems.