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ATLANTA - January 31, 2007 - McKesson, the world’s largest healthcare services company, has begun the assimilation of Per-Se Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of financial and administrative healthcare solutions for hospitals, physicians and retail pharmacies. McKesson completed the Per-Se acquisition on Jan. 26, 2007, adding nearly 6,000 employees and a customer base that includes approximately 100,000 physicians in small practices, 17,000 hospital-affiliated physicians, 3,000 hospitals, and 50,000 retail and institutional pharmacies.
The addition of Per-Se further strengthens McKesson’s leadership in managing the business of healthcare, from revenue cycle outsourcing and business office management to high-acuity resource management, financial transaction solutions, and pharmacy claims processing and network services. The acquisition also gives McKesson the opportunity to combine the connectivity assets from both companies into a new business known as RelayHealth. RelayHealth will expand on McKesson’s current physician-patient communications business with a focus on helping to decrease administrative costs and improve care by connecting physicians and other providers, pharmacies, payors, and consumers.
“We see a great opportunity to use our Web-based solutions and pharmacy and payor networks to make care delivery more interactive and better connected,” said Pamela Pure, president of McKesson Provider Technologies. “We’re also excited about the ability to accelerate growth in markets like small physician practices and retail pharmacies while building even stronger relationships in our hospital and payor bases.”
With integration efforts under way, McKesson plans to leverage Per-Se’s expertise in revenue cycle management for physician practices. As a total solution provider, McKesson will offer a complete package of healthcare IT, revenue cycle outsourcing, connectivity services and supplies. “Our goal is to enable physicians to focus on practicing medicine while we provide the technology, supplies and back-office support to manage their practices and help ensure quality care delivery,” said Pure.
In the hospital, Per-Se’s revenue cycle outsourcing and network transactions business complement and further strengthen McKesson’s leadership in revenue cycle management, an area of increasing focus in the face of initiatives like consumer-directed healthcare and pricing transparency. Per-Se also brings capabilities for managing high-acuity areas like surgical departments, as well as an innovative Web-based staff scheduling solution that enables nurses and others on the care team to request extra shifts based on their preferences, workload and patient acuity.
For retail and high-volume pharmacies, Per-Se augments McKesson’s capabilities in retail and institutional pharmacy management software. “McKesson has been highly focused on broadening its portfolio of offerings to pharmacists,” said Stanton J. McComb, president, McKesson Pharmacy Systems. “Per-Se brings a fully integrated suite of products to address the needs of the large retail, national chain pharmacies as well as mail order and outpatient pharmacies.”
In recent years, McKesson has expanded its retail offering by introducing Central Fill solutions that enable retail chain pharmacies to aggregate prescriptions from multiple locations and funnel them to a centrally located prescription fulfillment center. McKesson has also enhanced its HealthMart program, now the nation’s fastest-growing pharmacy franchise, and continues to expand its pharmacy systems and robotics offerings. These offerings help pharmacies to integrate and automate every major pharmacy process, including prescription processing, claims adjudication, point-of-sale, inventory management and integration with automation and workflow.
The combined synergies will provide exceptional solution sets for hospitals, physicians and payors as well as retail, mail and institutional pharmacies.
RelayHealth to Focus on Better Connected Healthcare
The goal of the new RelayHealth business is to improve how physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, payors and patients share information, interact and collaborate to improve the quality of care. RelayHealth will operate in a vendor-neutral manner, supporting connectivity and interoperability with both McKesson and non-McKesson solutions. Its market-leading capabilities for managing the flow of information and connecting healthcare are as follows:
In the area of pharmacy solutions, RelayHealth combines the Per-Se Intelligent Network with McKesson pharmacy networking services to process more than 8.5 billion pharmacy transactions annually and maintain connections to more than 90% of the nation’s pharmacies.
For payors and providers, RelayHealth will leverage the strengths of McKesson’s Transaction Solutions Hub™ and related services with Per-Se’s corresponding revenue cycle management offerings. The new business will process more than 1 billion financial transactions annually, including a broad range of capabilities to ensure that payment sources for services are properly identified prior to care delivery and subsequently settled accurately.
In the consumer space, McKesson’s existing RelayHealth business pioneered and is rapidly growing its physician-patient connectivity and care management tools and services that connect physicians with their patients, other physicians, providers, pharmacies and payors.
“As we partner with customers to build top-performing organizations, some of the greatest opportunities for improvement go beyond automating care within a setting to connecting the myriad of processes that must occur across settings,” said Pure. “We believe there is an opportunity to couple automation with network connectivity to make care – and the exchange of related information – more immediate and more fully connected. As that happens, we believe you’ll see not only greater efficiency, but also higher quality and better outcomes.”
To learn more about RelayHealth and opportunities to participate in connecting healthcare, visit Booth 3341 at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Annual Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans, February 25-March 1. You can find the full range of McKesson solutions in Booth 1215. |
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