SureScripts becoming a health ISP

The home pages of both companies are currently trumpeting the relationship. SureScripts is calling the offering clinical interoperability services. Kryptiq calls it America's interactive network.

All this starts to become real next month when SureScripts launches messaging based on Kryptiq technology. I wrote about Kryptiq during HIMSS, interviewing CEO Luis Machuca about how its systems get around the FUD concerning HIPAA, allowing doctors to e-mail doctors and patients without worrying about privacy or security.

On Friday ZDNet talked with Cris Ross, an executive vice president for SureScripts and the company's general manager of clinical interoperability services (right, from SureScripts), about the new offering.

"We have 200,000 doctors and 2-300 systems doing 25% of all prescriptions electronically" today, he said. "We want a physician to have one plug into their practice for multiple channels of clinical information. The network advantage of using one network for multiple things can be significant."

Currently, "There is separation between clinical and administrative systems. In the near term we won't be carrying claims or administrative data. This is being built to mainly meet the needs of Meaningful Use stage one, which is clinical exchange between physicians for purpose of continuity of care, discharge notes, referrals, structured and unstructured notes."

The relevant document here is called a Continuing Care Record (CCR). A CCR should be completed after each patient visit, it can be printed and handed to the patient, and it can be sent to another doctor.

"For the last two years we've been carrying CCR records for MinuteClinic to primary care physicians. We've done about 1 million transactions to all 50 states," Ross explained. "Most go through the SureScripts network and then go to a fax, because physicians aren't wired to receive."

This need brought the two companies together. "We've partnered with Kryptiq previously to put end points in place for MinuteClinic. This is a chance to increase that by a couple of orders of magnitude. The SureScripts network is augmented with edge tools provided by Kryptiq so we can do the last mile delivery of clinical messages."