Two Health-Care Deals With Tech VendorsTwo Health-Care Deals With Tech Vendors

Two prestigious health-care providers in the Northeast are rolling out IT initiatives aimed at improving clinical care.

Lahey Clinic, a Boston nonprofit teaching hospital, has signed a four-year deal to deploy ZixCorp.'s PocketScript E-prescribing technology to at least 650 doctors. PocketScript lets physicians replace paper-based prescriptions with electronic ones that are transmitted directly to Lahey and retail pharmacies. The E-prescriptions help eliminate errors that occur due to illegible handwriting and can alert doctors to drug allergies.

Lahey says part of the PocketScript implementation costs will be subsidized by the eRx Collaborative, a program funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Tufts Health Plan. The groups want more Massachusetts health-care providers using E-prescriptions.

Also, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center signed a three-year, multimillion dollar, electronic-health record initiative with IBM. The new contract expands upon work started in 2003 to digitize records of about 2 million medical-center patients in Pennsylvania and will be based on a infrastructure comprised of IBM eServer and TotalStorage systems running clinical applications from Cerner Corp.

The latest initiative will boost performance of medical-center E-health systems, allowing doctors, including those in emergency and operating rooms, to electronically access the most timely patient information available, including physician notes and drug data.