Blues plan offers EMR access to members, doctors

The system will provide medical and prescribing history to physicians at no cost, but on a read-only basis.

By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. May 14, 2007.

Health Care Service Corp., a BlueCross BlueShield plan operator, said it is integrating the medical information of more than 11 million members of its plans in Illinois, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas into a single electronic health record that will be available, free of charge, to plan members and their physicians.

Chicago-based HCSC will allow physicians access to online records, given that many practices have been unable to acquire them due to cost or other reasons. The company is calling the system an EHR, though it is essentially the same thing as a more common term, the electronic medical record, or EMR.

However, the system is limited in that physicians are only able to view the records. They are unable to contribute to them.

The system, two years in the making, was launched last year in New Mexico and Oklahoma and earlier this year in Illinois. It will go live in Texas sometime this summer. The records will include claims data, a medication history and a list of hospitalizations and treatments.

William E. Gerardi, MD, clinical adviser for managed health care delivery for HCSC, said this is the first-known EHR system to allow access to physicians, patients and payers. Most Blues plans do offer free, online personal health records for members.