Brown & Toland Medical Group will offer its physicians practice management and electronic medical records tools designed to improve health care, increase physician office administrative efficiencies and reduce costs.

"It is important that we provide our physicians with the technology to simplify work processes, improve billing functions, create more efficiencies and reduce the difficulty of running a physician practice," said Gloria Austin, Brown & Toland's Chief Executive Officer. "The products we will provide perfectly align with our goals to provide practice management services to our physicians and to reduce health care costs for our patients."

The practice management system, IDX Systems Corporation's Flowcast, provides electronic tools to help physician offices manage patient access and patient financial services, including patient registration, appointment scheduling, eligibility and benefit plan verification, and offers the BTMG patients online services, such as appointment requests, prescription refill requests, and patient account management.

"We know that for individual physicians, implementing and maintaining a state-of-the-art computer information system is time consuming, difficult to manage, and expensive," said Nancy Griest, Brown & Toland's vice president, Medical Group Services. "Automating administrative functions at the physician office level allow physicians to do what they do best - practice medicine."

Brown & Toland also will offer its community-based physicians the Allscripts Healthcare Solution's Touchworks Electronic Medical Record System, a product that integrates with IDX Flowcast. The EMR, which is available in modules, offers physicians a host of functions, including clinical results, e-prescribing, note taking, and scanning. Physicians may select EMR services that fit with their current workflow and practice requirements and add additional services as needed.

BTMG is targeting to install the Flowcast system into a pilot office in December 2004. EMR services are expected to be available to its 700 community physicians, as well as web-based interfaces with BTMG's University of California - San Francisco physicians, in the third quarter of this year.

Austin noted that BTMG will offer these services to its physicians at competitive rates.

"We reviewed the financial impact of this project and determined that we can provide these services to our physicians and save them money at the same time," said Austin. "Both systems further clinically integrate our medical group, providing benefits to our physicians and patients. As an industry health care does not use technology to the fullest extent possible. We are ready to change that in San Francisco."