Surescripts merger 1 year old as ARRA pushes e-Rx

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the merger of the two largest electronic-prescribing exchanges, SureScripts and RxHub, creating a market-dominant, privately held, for-profit company just in time for the federal government to all but mandate that physicians e-prescribe.

So, how is the merger going? The answer depends on who’s talking.

“The question you may be asking is, has the merger yielded any benefits and we’re happy to say, it absolutely has,” said Harry Totonis, CEO of the merged company, now called Surescripts.

Totonis only recently joined Surescripts—in April—after serving as head of adviser services at MasterCard, and previously working 14 years as a consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton, which works extensively in healthcare as well as for the federal government in defense and national security and intelligence programs.

“E-prescribing volume has just skyrocketed and we’ve handled that without adding a lot of new people,” Totonis said. “We’re processing twice as many transactions with relatively the same number of people. The efficiency we get is benefiting everyone.”

Justin Barnes is a vice president of Carrollton, Ga.-based Greenway Medical Technologies. In that post, he oversees corporate development, strategy, marketing and government affairs for the electronic health-record system vendor. Barnes also serves as chairman of the Electronic Health Record Association, a trade group for EHR vendors that is an arm of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

Vendors, Barnes said, while not hostile to Surescripts having such predominance, are “not completely comfortable” with the situation, either.

“It’s kind of pushed on us,” Barnes said. “When you have no competition, they may not want to listen to people. Competition breeds excellence at the end of the day. It always has and always will.”

The merger, which seems natural now, pooled the resources of two competing companies whose rival sponsors that either are themselves or have members that are still battling for market share in prescription drug sales. Both SureScripts and RxHub were formed in the aftermath of the 2000 bursting of the dot-com bubble that wiped out scads of e-prescribing startup companies. Read More Electronic Prescription