Managed care organizations are geographically diverse. Our service provides managed care the tools to communicate with physicians and disseminate guidelines to them. Physicians' Online also will help doctors communicate with one another. The service provides a number of forums on topics of interest, including H. pylori, AIDS and health care reform. Moreover, drug companies, not doctors, are paying for all this.
Doctors use most services free.
Pfizer, for example, is backing Humana's area on Physicians' Online. Other health plans are working on similar applications. In coming years, Aetna physicians will be able to do many of the administrative chores they now dread through the Internet area called the World Wide Web, says Richard Eidinger, M.D., M.B.A., president and CEO of Aetna Health Plans of Arizona. Most people find the web, or WWW, to be the easiest way to use the Internet. In time, providers who have online access will use the web page to jump through a lot of the standard hoops, such as prior authorization requests.