Arkansas In-Home Services Chooses McKesson For Statewide Information Technology Initiative

Horizon Homecare to service 8,000 patients receiving homecare, hospice services and personal care services

Atlanta - The In-Home Services program, a branch of the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services, recently announced that it will deploy McKesson's Horizon Homecare solution to enhance the quality and efficiency of care delivered in 8,000 patient homes across the state of Arkansas. The integrated applications will enable more than 250 office staff and 3,000 clinician staff to automate clinical documentation, streamline administration and improve case communication. As part of the statewide initiative, In-Home Services will also deploy point-of-care clinical documentation to 450 clinicians via laptops and 150 clinicians via handheld devices, enabling them to chart patient care as it is delivered. Horizon Homecare TelephonyTM, McKesson's telephone-based documentation system, also will be implemented to automate the documentation of home visits made by more than 2,000 additional field staff.

According to Charles McGrew, director of the Center for Local Public Health, the Division of Health sought a technology partner with proven implementation experience and the ability to service a large, complex organization with distributed operations. Each year, the 74 offices of In-Home Services manage 350,000 home visits, 2 million hours of personal care services and 50,000 hospice days.

"We need a single-database system that can accommodate all service lines, including Home Health, Hospice and Personal Care/Elderchoices, Maternal Infant Program, and Case Management for the Elderly," said McGrew. "McKesson addresses all of those requirements, and its applications have a track record of streamlining the broad spectrum of homecare operations, from intake to accounts receivable and reporting. McKesson also provided an implementation plan that was instrumental in our decision-making process. We could see that McKesson had taken into consideration the scale and complexity of our organization and was fully capable of meeting all of our needs."

With an aging population placing greater demand on healthcare resources, In-Home Services represents a growing trend among healthcare providers to seek solutions that support a full patient management strategy in order to allocate resources to more acute care. The current cost of managing chronic illnesses, which affect nearly 132 million Americans, represents about 75 percent of total healthcare spending.

McGrew said that he expects Horizon Homecare to help improve utilization, reduce unauthorized visits and to pay for itself a year after implementation. "Most important, it will save our office and clinical staff valuable time in administrative duties so they can focus more time on the patient and less time on shuffling papers," added McGrew.

"Arkansas' In-Home Services program has taken a big step forward in achieving a connected healthcare service," said Craig Frazier, vice president and general manager, McKesson. "Their management put the welfare of the patient first throughout the selection process, recognizing that the ability to automate clinical and administrative processes would enable the clinical staff to have more time to devote to care."

McKesson leads the industry in supporting the information needs of homecare organizations. Horizon Homecare is the foundation for McKesson's strategy to expand the healthcare infrastructure to include home technologies to address the growing need for homecare delivery. More than 19,000 nurses and other clinicians rely on Horizon Homecare to support more than 42 million patient visits per year in the home.

SOURCE: McKesson Corporation