Case Study: VAR Prescribes Technology Solution For Health Insurer

"We are catching up, and we're trying to catch up fast," said Ron Ponder, executive vice president and CIO of WellPoint Health Networks, an insurance provider in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

To tackle the problem, WellPoint embarked on the creation of a paperwork reduction package and a Computerized Physician Order Entry (CPOE) system. The company turned to New York-based solution provider Capgemini to offer medical practitioners access to an e-prescribing service via wireless PDAs.

Dell provided the hand-held Axim Pocket PCs on which physicians enter the prescriptions. Wireless networking and access points were provided by Cisco Systems, while Microsoft, AllScripts and Zix provided the software platforms. Though still in the pilot phase, the solution has been implemented free-of-charge to 20,000 of WellPoint's network physicians in California, Georgia, Missouri and Wisconsin.

The solution includes a one-year subscription to an e-prescribing service which can warn doctors about possible drug interactions, based on patient and pharmacy records. It also provides drug-specific information that can prevent prescribing mix-ups between drugs with similar names and can keep doctors up-to-date on new drugs as they come to market.

With more than 3.5 million prescriptions written in the United States each year, according to the Institute of Medicine, a huge and largely untapped market exists for software to manage the process. The Institute of Medicine also reports that at least 95 percent of adverse drug effects and prescribing errors can be prevented by using a CPOE.

Unfortunately, numerous CPOE systems have failed because they have been too expensive, too difficult to use or because of the challenges of collaboration. These concerns prompted Capgemini to be cautious when designing the system.

"We tried to be as objective and rigorous as possible to take into account all vendors that were interested. We developed a [hardware and software] functionality grid, a compatibility grid and researched vendors' education and implementation programs," said Jodie Skyberg, senior manager of Capgemini's pharmacy benefits management practice. "As long as vendors met a set of rigorous requirements, they were eligible to participate," she said.

Skyberg worked with John DiStefano, vice president and technology services leader of Capgemini's health-care business unit to manage the project, screen potential vendors, coordinate actions between vendors and handle all dependencies and training.

"We were tasked with trying to get the right providers and the right technologies in place to get things done right for the physicians," said DiStefano. The team was on-site for a number of rollouts and tested the system with select groups of physicians. These tests allowed Capgemini to identify and correct glitches and workflow bottlenecks, and to ensure the solution would incorporate seamlessly into actual medical office practices.

Ponder cites the project as a great example of cooperation in the technology industry. Though Ponder said he was unsure how well all of the vendor partners would get along in the project, the advantages of collaboration were almost immediately apparent. "The vendors we worked with were eager to do so because of the vast opportunity in this space. ... There was an enormous amount of interest from the vendors in health care as well as mobility," he said.

The WellPoint initiative has primed the pump for the rest of the health care industry, and several other associations have been set up between health-care providers and technology companies. Insurance provider Blue Cross/Blue Shield, for example, has contacted Dell, Cisco and Microsoft to explore implementing a similar solution for its physicians.