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5500 Preparer's Manual for 2012 Plan Years
The premier resource in the field of Form 5500 preparation, 5500 Preparer's Manual will help you handle the required annual Form 5500 filings for both pension benefits and welfare benefit plans.
from Spencer’s Benefits Reports: On January 16, a coalition of major technology firms and health care organizations in the U.S. announced a national initiative to provide free electronic prescribing for every physician in the country. The National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) is the first nationwide effort to improve patient safety by offering a solution to the medication errors that harm millions of patients each year, the coalition said in a press release. Preventable medication errors injure at least 1.5 million Americans and cause more than 7,000 deaths each year, according to a July 2006 study by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academy of Sciences. In an effort to reduce these errors, the IOM has called on all of the nation’s physicians to adopt electronic prescribing by 2010.
Recognizing the capacity of widespread and uniform use of electronic health records and e-prescribing to improve health care quality and lower costs, in April 2004, President George W. Bush called for widespread adoption of interoperable electronic health records within ten years and issued an executive order that established the position of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Since then, the federal government and multiple private groups have announced initiatives to expand the use of electronic health records, allow patients to maintain their own private electronic health records, and encourage e-prescribing.
Currently, fewer than one-fifth of the nation’s practicing physicians process prescriptions electronically. Studies indicate that most physicians have been reluctant to adopt electronic prescribing largely because of the cost of the systems, and a perception that the technology requires too much time to learn and install.
NEPSI will help address those barriers by providing physicians simple, safe, and secure electronic prescribing at no cost. NEPSI is led by Allscripts, a leading provider of clinical software, information, and connectivity solutions that physicians use to improve health hcare; and by national sponsor Dell Computers, Inc. Other technology companies sponsoring NEPSI are Cisco Systems Corporation; Fujitsu Computers of America, Inc.; Google, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; Sprint Nextel Corporation; SureScripts, Inc.; and Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.
Intel chairman Craig Barrett, who recently announced an initiative with major employers to provide a personal health record system for their employees, commented, “Paper prescriptions are a key cause of cost, errors, and inefficiency in U.S. health care. Which other industry could tell their customers it was okay to have a 15% error rate; imagine the airlines landing at the wrong destination 15% of the time. Electronic prescribing should be the rule, not the exception. We look forward to working together with Allscripts and this initiative to lower health care costs and drive improvements, ultimately providing more timely and accurate information to our employees through direct feeds to the Dossia lifelong health record.”
A key element of the NEPSI initiative is participation by two of the nation’s largest health benefits companies, Aetna and WellPoint, as well as regional players such as Horizon Blue Cross and Blue Shield of New Jersey. The coalition’s health benefits sponsors will provide a range of incentives to physicians in their networks to encourage adoption and use of electronic prescribing technology. The health benefits companies’ view is that electronic prescribing adds quality and efficiency to the patient care process.
More than one dozen of the leading regional academic medical centers, integrated delivery networks, and physician groups across the country will serve as regional supporters of NEPSI, leading the delivery and support of electronic prescribing to physicians in their states and regions by providing education, training, incentives, and local physician support.
The NEPSI program’s foundation is eRx NOW™, Web-based software from Allscripts powered by the same engine used today by more than 20,000 physicians to write millions of electronic prescriptions each year. Designed to appeal to physicians in solo practice or small groups, eRx NOW™ is available free to any health care provider with legal authority to prescribe medications, and requires no download, no new hardware, and minimal training.
Physicians interested about finding out more information or registering for the program should visit the NEPSI Web site, http://www.nationaleRx.com.
For more information on this and related topics, consult the CCH Pension Plan Guide, CCH Employee Benefits Management, and Spencer's Benefits Reports.
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