Erie County Medical Center to implement Allscripts EHR

Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) announced today that Erie County Medical Center (ECMC) Corporation, a 550-bed academic medical center in Buffalo, has selected the Allscripts Electronic Health Record (EHR) for 100 of its physicians to enhance the quality of patient care, improve physician and patient communications, and better manage the cost of care delivery in 24 outpatient clinics.

A major teaching facility for the University at Buffalo, ECMC also is a key participant in a regional health information organization (RHIO) that recently received a $16 million federal grant to increase the use of health IT in the Buffalo area for clinical quality improvement. ECMC was the value of the Allscripts solution in helping the organization to satisfy the "meaningful use" requirements of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). In addition, ECMC's relationship with UBMD, the University of New York at Buffalo's faculty practice, a current user of Allscripts, will facilitate the transition from paper to electronic records for ECMC.  

"The ability of Allscripts to make our healthcare system more efficient and to meet the needs of our clinicians is very important to us," said Leslie Feidt, Chief Information Officer of ECMC. "The Allscripts EHR will also help us satisfy the government's 'meaningful use' requirements, in part by enabling us to collect and report quality data. This will be very important in improving the quality of care and patient outcomes."

Katrina Karas, Director of Ambulatory and Renal Services for ECMC, commented, "The Allscripts EHR meets the needs of our primary-care clinics as well as our many specialties, ranging from surgery and orthopedics to gastroenterology and anti-coagulation therapy."

ECMC will link the Allscripts solution to the hospital's inpatient Meditech Electronic Health Record and billing system, ensuring that their physicians inside and outside the hospital have access to the same patient information. ECMC also will implement the Allscripts Analytics solution to run quality reports and display them on an easy-to-use dashboard. According to Feidt, ECMC will use the analytics application not only for external reporting of quality data, but also internally to help physician leaders identify and remedy gaps in care.

Additionally, ECMC will deploy the Allscripts Universal Application Integrator (UAI), which enables customers to interface the Allscripts EHR with medical devices and third-party software without writing special interfaces. UAI allows Allscripts to add best-of-breed functionality quickly, often 12 to 18 months faster than other vendors can achieve using traditional development methods.

"At a time when information silos, whether paper or digital, hamper the ability of providers to care for patients, building interoperability among health IT systems is more important than ever," said Glen Tullman, Chief Executive Officer of Allscripts. "The Erie County Medical Center and its physicians are ahead of the curve in their focus on interoperability, not only connecting our solution with their own inpatient system, but also helping to create a community platform that will improve the coordination of care and care outcomes for all patients in the Buffalo area."

With the help of the Allscripts READY program, which accelerates EHR implementation, ECMC expects to go live on the Electronic Health Record by the beginning of 2011.