Sierra Health Services Partners With Clark County Medical Society To Fund Electronic Prescribing For All Nevada Physicians

Electronic prescriptions reduce medical errors and save lives. They also greatly improve patient satisfaction and convenience. E-prescriptions represent such an important advancement in health care that Sierra Health Services (the parent company of Southwest Medical Associates) has partnered with the Clark County Medical Society in a major initiative to fund e-prescribe software for all Nevada physicians.

These organizations believe that through their collaboration, they can rapidly accelerate physician adoption of electronic prescriptions (ERX) across the state. Under this initiative, all physician members of the Clark County Medical Society are eligible for a free 10-year license for Allscripts electronic prescribing software and two years of monthly maintenance services. All other physicians in the state are eligible to receive the software at no cost, but will be responsible for a nominal monthly maintenance fee.

"As both an insurer and a provider of health care, Sierra is uniquely positioned to implement this emerging technology," says Anthony Marlon, M.D., Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sierra Health Services, of which Health Plan of Nevada is a subsidiary. "Once we began to see an improvement in patient satisfaction and the quality of care, we knew we had to find a way to make this technology available to all physicians in the state of Nevada.

"Our practitioners would never return to handwritten prescriptions," says Craig Morrow, M.D., Medical Director of Southwest Medical Associates Primary Care and Urgent Care. "We generate more than one million electronic prescriptions annually, and our physicians and patients love it," Dr. Morrow says. "This is an incredibly generous and visionary step on Dr. Marlon’s part to help make this technology available to all physicians across the state. He understands that this represents a quantum leap forward in health care."