Horizon Anesthesia Management from McKesson Extends Electronic Health Record

ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--In the latest move to enhance its surgical solution suite, McKesson today announced it has acquired an intellectual property license from DocuSys for its anesthesia information system, Horizon Anesthesia Management. The solution offers a fully automated anesthesia documentation record that provides complete and consistent information to help clinicians identify and avoid potential medication errors. The new license agreement will enable McKesson to fully support, maintain and develop the anesthesia application, which has sold for the past four years under private label. A primary goal of the agreement is to further integrate the anesthesia application with the company’s market-leading surgical management solution, Horizon Surgical Manager™, and extend the patient’s electronic health record in support of improved patient safety, decision support, clinical analytics and compliance reporting.

A part of the Horizon Clinicals® product suite, Horizon Surgical Manager integrates scheduling, supply management, clinical documentation and performance management into one system. The ability to fully integrate the anesthesia management to this solution will round out the operating room data electronically captured and complete the surgical encounter record, providing the entire care team with access to the most complete and up-to-date patient information available. Moreover, when integrated and combined with Horizon Clinicals software solutions for the enterprise, organizations have a powerful means to improve patient documentation and outcomes.

“With 95 percent of medication given in the operating room administered via anesthesia, automatic tracking and documentation of this component of the surgical event is essential to higher quality patient care and appropriate levels of data capture,” said Duncan James, group president, Health Systems Solutions, McKesson Provider Technologies. “This agreement will enhance the value of our surgical solution suite by further tying together the clinical and business aspects of patient care in the operating room. At the same time it extends our enterprisewide platform for electronic health records to advance patient care and help organizations optimize operating room utilization and increase practitioner and hospital revenue.”

Horizon Anesthesia Management enhances the standard of care for anesthesia by delivering a complete Web-based preoperative history and removing the manual process of tracking patient condition during the surgical event. Decision-support analytics provide physician alerts to help prevent medication errors during drug dispensing. To support the administrative function of the operating room, Horizon Anesthesia Management’s professional billing feature captures anesthesia charges accurately and efficiently for proper billing of each patient. Included in the billing feature is a co-morbid coding module which captures and codes for each patient’s specific anesthesia needs.

“I believe that McKesson has improved patient safety at our institution in two ways,” said Stanley Muravchick, MD, PhD, Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “First, unlike the handwritten anesthesia record, the anesthesia solution generates an accurate and objective basis for decision-making by continuously recording and displaying comprehensive clinical data during anesthesia and surgery, even when the anesthesiologist is preoccupied with technical and procedural tasks. Second, it facilitates our clinical effectiveness and quality improvement (CEQI) program with detailed and legible records that can be retrieved, reviewed and presented for the purpose of establishing ‘best practice’ standards. McKesson has also produced financial benefits, since billing information is now transmitted electronically to the office immediately upon each case closure, rather than several days later. In addition, McKesson generates time- and date-stamped attestation notes that helps us to meet the substantial requirements for documentation associated with CMS and Joint Commission standards.”

About McKesson Corporation

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes and improving the quality and safety of patient care. Over the course of its 174-year history, San Francisco-based McKesson has grown to provide pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information, visit us at http://www.McKesson.com.