CHICAGO – The American Medical Association (AMA) is offering physicians across the country a new online platform for access to an electronic health system from Ingenix, called CareTracker.
The AMA announced Wednesday it had selected Ingenix CareTracker as the first EHR system offered through the AMA's new online health information solutions platform for physicians. The intent, say AMA officials, is to enable physicians to assess and meet their clinical and practice needs. It will provide physicians access to information, products and services with a single, secure sign-on.
Ingenix is a subsidiary of health insurer UnitedHealth Group.
The AMA platform, which will launch nationwide later this year, is being beta tested in Michigan in collaboration with the Michigan State Medical Society.
"Increasing use of EHRs and health information technology overall will be essential to improving patient outcomes and reducing the administrative burdens on doctors," said Joseph M. Heyman, MD, immediate past board chairman of the AMA. "Ingenix CareTracker is an excellent example of a health information technology that will help advance physicians' adoption of tools that will enhance care quality and improve patient safety."
"Ingenix and the AMA will help doctors adopt health IT systems that reduce time spent on administrative tasks and enable them to devote more of their time to patient care," said Bill Miller, executive vice president of Healthcare Delivery Systems at Ingenix. "Ingenix CareTracker integrates patient medical records and e-prescribing tools into the physician's workflow."
Miller added that Ingenix CareTracker can help physicians demonstrate "meaningful use" of an EHR system, which is necessary to qualify for up to $44,000 in federal incentives, provided through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, to implement the technology.
With CareTracker, physicians can also enter, retrieve and correlate patient information at the point of care.
Earlier this week, the AMA signed an hardware and consulting agreement with Dell Inc. to help doctors adopt new health information technologies. Terms of the Dell and Ingenix deals were not disclosed.
