Health insurer Horizon BCBS will sponsor affiliated physicians’ use of ePhysician Practice.
ePhysician, developer of the ePhysician Practice handheld physician service, has announced that nonprofit health insurer Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey will sponsor the use of its platform among affiliated New Jersey physicians. The ePhysician service enables ePrescribing, charge capture, access to drug reference information, practice management capabilities and formulary compliance assistance though a Palm handheld device.
The two companies will also collaborate to provide physicians with treatment guidelines for hypercholesterolemia and FDA warning information. The companies hope that they will be able to collect enough information from the systems regarding patient compliance and impact of ePrescribing on physician prescribing decisions to publish the data.
A strategy of using handheld devices as a mechanism for the collection of data, as well as for the dissemination of data, has always been a part of ePhysician’s business model. The company has used its handheld devices to collect information regarding physicians’ prescribing patterns for projects for pharmaceutical companies in the past.
ePhysician has told Datamonitor that it plans to extend this strategy to collect more information of this type to package and sell to pharmaceutical companies, rather than collecting information on a project-by-project basis. This strategy is useful because it allows ePhysician additional revenue streams outside of the still-developing ePrescribing market. However, data collection will not be possible until enough physicians are using the ePhysician system to create statistically significant data, thereby requiring further development in the ePrescribing market to reap success.
