Nov. 4, 2009 (PR Newswire) --

CHICAGO and GULFPORT, Miss., Nov. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Allscripts (Nasdaq: MDRX) announced today that Memorial Hospital at Gulfport has selected the Company's Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) solution, with Allscripts Revenue Cycle Management, to enhance the quality of the care delivered by its 100 employed physicians, improve patient communications, and better manage the cost of care delivery.

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Memorial Hospital at Gulfport is the largest healthcare provider in the Gulfport , located 70 miles east of New Orleans, is one of the largest healthcare providers on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Among the most comprehensive medical facilities in Mississippi, Memorial is a not-for-profit 445-bed facility with 30 owned physician clinics, a medical staff of 275 physicians and a long history of investing in technology. Memorial is rated a Stage 5 hospital on the HIMSS Adoption scale, placing it in the top 5 percent of US hospitals for the use of information technologies to maximize patient safety.

"Our strategy of sustained investment in IT on the inpatient side has been crucial to becoming a leader in quality, patient safety and patient satisfaction, and we believe Allscripts will help us extend our delivery of high quality healthcare to the outpatient arena," said Richard Ferrans, MD, Vice President and Medical Information Officer of Memorial Hospital.

The Allscripts Electronic Health Record enables Memorial's physicians to instantly access patient information when and where they need it - in the clinic, at the hospital or while on-call at home -- and automates everyday clinical tasks such as prescribing medications, documenting patient visits and obtaining best-practice guidelines for care.

Ferrans said he is excited at the prospect of connecting the Electronic Health Record with the Mississippi Coast Health Information Exchange (MSCHIE) a state program that is focused on enhancing healthcare infrastructure in Gulf Coast counties that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. Memorial is a founding member of the HIE, which will enable the hospital's physicians to share and access secure, aggregated patient clinical information from IT systems in physician offices, hospitals and other care sites 24 hours a day.

"We believe it's critical to connect our community of physicians to the HIE, to enhance the overall continuity of care, reduce costs, and ensure that up-to-date information is securely available to share between all providers on the Coast," said Ferrans.

Within the Memorial community, the Allscripts Electronic Health Record will give Memorial's physicians a dashboard view of key clinical measures including alerts when lab results and other data indicate a health threat, either to an individual patient or across the entire patient population. "Allscripts will help us understand better the needs of our patients so we can better plan our resources and effective interventions to improve the quality of our care," said Ferrans.