Pharmacy Chains Expanding Use Of EHRs
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
According to HealthData Management, health and pharmacy retailer CVS Health has begun partnering with regional health systems in various areas of the country.
The clinical affiliations have been created with the goal of better coordination between CVS pharmacies, their MinuteClinic walk-in services, and three regional health systems:
- Baptist Health System of Birmingham AL
- Community Health Systems in PA, AZ, and TN
- Premier Health in Dayton, OH
The EHR
These partnerships will rest on a backbone of integrated EHR systems and will provide “critical prescription and visit information” to the affiliated health systems through secure communication.” The integration will also include messages and alerts from the CVS side, sent to system physicians, making them aware of medication non-adherence issues.
Primary Care
MinuteClinic will also be sharing patient visit summaries with primary care physicians if they are not a part of the health system affiliate. This will only be done with the patient’s consent. They will also continue the practice of sending visit summaries to primary care providers who are not affiliates in the partnership, via fax or mail, with patient consent.
These new clinical affiliations will bring the total count for CVS Health and MinuteClinic to more than 40 across the U.S.
The Walgreen’s Path
The American Pharmacists Association has recently reported that Walgreens is also making advancement in the area of EHRs, implementing an EHR system — the Walgreens Cloud EHR — that will enable staff at their 8,200+ locations to have uniform access to patient information including prescription, immunization, and health testing records.
According to Nimesh Jhaveri, BSPharm, MBA, divisional VP of Healthcare Solutions Group at Walgreens, “Most systems in pharmacy have been steered to really fill prescriptions quickly, accurately, and then bill for those prescriptions. What our cloud EHR does is really enable Walgreens pharmacists to begin to document clinical interactions and clinical services in a system that is interconnected.”
Both announcements fit into a larger narrative of hospitals reacting to the understanding that patients, after they leave the hospital setting, are accessing their local pharmacy. For solutions providers, this means that even local pharmacists will need access to, and guidance around EHR systems and communications with the larger healthcare environment.