Scripps Health, a nonprofit community health system, is poised to automate its electronic prescription orders, lost charge capture and clinical quality for nearly 550 physicians in its 19 outpatient clinics in San Diego County.

Scripps will implement an electronic health record system developed by Chicago-based Allscripts at Scripps Clinic, with nearly 450 physicians in 50 medical specialties, and Scripps Coastal Medical Center, a primary care group with more than 100 physicians in offices and outpatient centers across San Diego County.

Scripps Health has 2,600 affiliated physicians and five acute-care hospital campuses serving half a million patients in San Diego County each year.
 
The Allscripts EHR automates everyday clinical tasks while electronically connecting physicians and other healthcare providers to laboratories, pharmacies and insurers. It provides access to patient information anywhere at anytime, whether providers are in the clinic, at the hospital or on-call at home.

The EHR also provides physicians with tools for documentation and orders, preloaded connections to medical devices and third-party software, and support for pay-for-performance and quality initiatives.

In tandem with the EHR rollout Scripps will implement the Allscripts Clinical Quality Solution (CQS), which offers clinical decision support at the point of care. CQS also automates the recordkeeping necessary for participating in private and public pay-for-quality and pay-for-performance bonus programs.

CQS extracts and compiles quality measures - such as a patient's cholesterol levels or blood pressure - from the electronic health record, practice management system and outside laboratories for programs such as the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI), administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.

"We felt comfortable selecting Allscripts based on their success with similar medical groups of our size and our belief that we could recoup a large portion of the cost of the system via CMS bonuses for PQRI and e-prescribing," said Patric Thomas, corporate vice president, information services for Scripps Health.

Allscripts CEO Glen Tullman said the selection of the Allscripts EHR by a prestigious healthcare institution like Scripps Health "reinforces the strength of our vision of connecting physicians to information they need to deliver better healthcare as well as our record of providing solutions to physicians that are both affordable and usable."