MedicalMine Adds E-Prescribing to Its EHR Software

MedicalMine, a nonprofit health care IT software company, has announced new Surescripts’ e-prescription capabilities for its ChARM electronic health records platform.

The company has completed certification to add the Surescripts service, which is the largest electronic prescription network in the United States. The e-prescribing features allow doctors to send messages from the cloud application to pharmacies. Through Surescripts, doctors prescribe new medications, authorize refills and receive denials on drugs from health plans.

More than 54,000 pharmacies use Surescripts to receive prescriptions from doctors. Hospitals and health information exchanges (HIEs) also access the service. Through Surescripts, doctors receive benefits information from health plans to enable them to prescribe lower-cost drugs for patients.

By adding e-prescribing to its EHR platform, MedicalMine aims to provide another tool for doctors and clinicians to monitor complex conditions or illnesses caused by multiple genes or environmental factors.

MedicalMine announced its integration with Surescripts on Sept. 16.

Built on the Zoho cloud platform, ChARM EHR is accessible through any Web browser on a desktop, laptop or iPad, according to Pramila Srinivasan, co-founder and CEO of MedicalMine.

“ChARM EHR features the same reliability, scalability and security offered by the Zoho cloud platform, which already hosts online applications used by millions every day, accessed from Zoho.com,” Srinivasan wrote in an email to eWEEK.

The iPad’s interface is particularly appealing to doctors using ChARM, according to Elizabeth Horn, co-founder and executive vice president of marketing and business development.

“Everything you touch on the iPad becomes a data point, and compared to some of the EHRs that have been on display forever, it’s like the speedboat compared to the ocean liner,” Horn told eWEEK. “We’ve built it on this innovative, flexible Zoho background.”

MedicalMine launched ChARM EHR, previously named ChARM Physician, in October 2010. It allows doctors to input medical records and even store children’s handwriting and photographs of rashes and bruises.

ChARM EHR provides a patient dashboard feature to allow clinicians to view data from multiple providers, including therapists, caregivers and other physicians.

By using ChARM EHR, doctors have been able to save time on retrieving patients’ medical histories, Horn said.

“To improve how we [refer] the kids to different kinds of treatments and enable doctors to make informed decisions about kids they were seeing with these chronic diseases, we really needed to move it into the EHR space,” Horn said.

The program allows physicians’ practices to manage their office workflow, schedule appointments and exchange messages with patients. Built-in charts allow doctors to keep track of symptoms and incorporate drug database data. It integrates with patient portals and allows physicians to extract data for studies.

MedicalMine introduced its first application, ChARMTracker, in June 2009 to allow users to monitor autism and other chronic diseases.

The company created its Children’s Autism Recovery Map (ChARM) Web applications to allow caregivers to track the progress of children suffering from autism and other chronic conditions.

Both co-founders, Horn and Srinivasan, have a child with autism. Srinivasan is the wife of Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu, and Horn is married to NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect that MedicalMine is a separate business entity from NetSuite and Zoho.