KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The worksite medical clinic that Cerner is building to serve its 3,500 employees gives the healthcare IT company an opportunity to put its own IT to work."IT is going to be the lifeblood of the clinic," said David Evans, Cerner's director of compensation and benefits.

The idea, he said, is to automate everything that can be automated in the physician practice to make life easier for both the healthcare provider and the patient, he said.

At Cerner's clinic, patient registration, doctor notes and prescriptions all will be electronic. Administrative tasks, of course, will be automated. Such mundane, non-clinical tasks are estimated to consume 30 percent of the cost of healthcare.

The Cerner clinic, slated to open next summer, will do what other worksite clinics do – save employees and the company time and money by cutting the time, averaging about four hours, that workers have to take off for each doctor visit.

It also will serve as a lab of sorts for Cerner's design engineers.

"IT in clinics is just as important, and often more important, than the role it plays in private practice," said James Hummer, chief executive officer of Whole Health Management, which operates about 100 on-site clinics throughout the country.

"You need a good IT system to capture the data to make informed decisions about where to allocate resources to maximize the return for the employer and employee."

Hummer sees a growing trend toward establishing workplace clinics. Whole Health Manage-ment research shows that about 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies have some sort of on-site health service for their employees. Of those companies, about 50 percent have in-house medical service, with the remainder outsourcing the service to local hospitals or medical groups, or national organizations, such as Whole Health Management.

Sprint, Freddie Mac and USA Today are among companies that have worksite clinics.

"We believe we are in a unique position to impact the trend," said Jeff Townsend, Cerner senior vice president.

"While the health clinic will have a direct impact on the administrative and care delivery costs of healthcare for Cerner associates and their families," Townsend said, "it will also return a more significant benefit – time. Taking a more holistic approach to the design, literally from the ground up, has already produced significant learning that will help demonstrate how healthcare IT can reduce the friction and unnecessary costs currently experienced in the delivery of care."

Evans, who noted that worksite clinics that sprung up 10 or 20 years ago were narrowly focused, usually on dealing with workplace injuries or workers' compensation cases. Today, they focus on management of population health – on wellness, "helping people really plan their health."