Barack Obama's Plan to Digitize Healthcare: Insights from Allscripts CEO Glenn Tolman (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Barack Obama has pledged to wire America's doctors and hospitals with electronic medical records. And Congress is now looking to spend $20 billion as part of the stimulus package in the works to help make it a reality. With me to talk about how to bring that healthcare technology to thousands of doctors and hospitals is Glenn Tolman, CEO of Allscripts Mises Healthcare. Glenn, thank you very much for joining us.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Vanessa. It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1: Now, you have been an advisor and longtime acquaintance of Barack Obama. Your company, Allscripts Mises, also is a pretty big player in electronic medical records already. Can you tell us a little bit briefly about your company and that market as it stands

Speaker 2: now? Sure. Well, let me first start with the company. Allscripts Mises is the leading provider of software, connectivity, and information solutions to physicians, to about 700 hospitals, and really across the healthcare network. So we have one out of every three physicians in the United States, and we're either helping those physicians manage their business or helping those hospitals connect by providing electronic health records, electronic prescribing, practice management, or a host of other kinds of value-added software services.

Speaker 1: We know that it's been still a pretty big challenge to get widespread use of electronic health records, especially with smaller doctor practices. What have you told Barack Obama, or Barack Obama the candidate anyway, what's the most important thing that needs to happen for this to be a success?

Speaker 2: Well, we've really said that all along the way that physicians look at electronic health records, and they look at them from a cost perspective, and they look at them from an incentive perspective. So we've said if you could provide physicians with upfront funding to allow them to adopt, to purchase electronic health records, and then follow that up with incentives, which would encourage utilization, that one-two punch, we think, would dramatically change the adoption rate for physicians. We've had a great example of it. There was a very successful program by CMS to encourage utilization of electronic prescribing. And what we saw, the CMS program provided $3,000 to $5,000 worth of incentives based on utilization to physicians. And based on that, over the last three months, we've seen a 60% increase in transactions, electronic prescribing.

Speaker 1: What's the number we're talking about? What's the threshold? How much money would it take for a doctor to commit to this?

Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting. To buy an electronic health record is typically on the order of $8,000 to $12,000. And there's two bills pending in the Congress today. The Snow-Stabenow bill in the Senate provides upfront funding, and they're providing upfront funding of about $15,000. And then what's called the High Tech Act, which is part of the overall stimulus package, it's providing about $40,000 of incentives over a five-year period. So again, the Congress is on the right track. Now we have to put those bills together and actually make them a reality. And President Obama has said he's going to do that, hopefully in the February timeframe.

Speaker 1: Okay. Glenn, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. I'm Vanessa Furmans with The Wall Street Journal.