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Tuesday, January 02, 2007This month, a group representing many of the region's largest employers is launching a program to encourage more doctors in the Akron-Canton area to adopt e-prescribing. The Employers Health Purchasing Corp. of Ohio wants to find 25 area doctors who are willing to be the first physicians in the region to use an e-prescribing tool called ``iScribe.'' The Canton-based group is made up of area employers that pay medical bills for their employees. Participating businesses -- including FirstEnergy, Diebold, the cities of Akron and Canton, Summit County, numerous school districts and others -- employ about 430,000 people. The employer group is offering the program in partnership with Caremark Rx Inc., the Nashville-based company that manages the employee pharmacy benefits for the coalition's member companies. The Canton-based group and Caremark will share the cost -- estimated at $8,000 per participating doctor -- to provide training and purchase the software, personal digital assistants and other hardware needed for iScribe. $8000 seems terribly steep, even if they use desktops instead of PDA's. iScribe used to be free. But now it's owned by Caremark. Years ago, the group practice I belonged to looked into adopting iScribe, but we decided against it because of contract clauses like this: Supplier also reserves the right to sell, transfer and license the Medical Data, including physician identifiable data, to third parties, including but not limited to pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, PBMs, healthcare clearinghouses, and data collection agencies, but only to the extent the Medical Data does not contain any Protected Health Information. posted by Sydney on 1/02/2007 08:18:00 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:This case aside, I think the trend of self-care and e-care is firmly in place and will deliver benefits to all. In the 90's you had e-trading and e-commerce, so it makes sense that this continues. It seems like there is a lot of e-services in areas like weightloss. Peertrainer is an example of this. They are a "virtual environment" for weight loss- essentially weight watchers, but online and do it yourself, or in this case with the help of others. You'll see sites like WebMD aggressively move in this area as well. They are saying it is all about information, but once you have a zillion people using your database, it becomes extremely efficient to offer services. Since Webmd is connected to many Doctors, they are a logical middleman to deliver these services. By 3:40 PM , at |
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