The Louisiana Health Information Exchange has developed an online portal that will let physicians affiliated with different hospitals exchange patient data, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports.
Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the value of electronic health records could have in preventing disruptions in care, according to physicians. The Bush administration after the hurricane awarded Louisiana a $3.7 million grant to transition to an EHR system.
LaHIE has used the federal grant to develop a program under which hospitals would maintain EHRs on their own servers; however, some information -- including patients' names, addresses, insurance information and allergies -- would be stored on a central database. If a physician needed additional information about a patient, it could be acquired through an information exchange, according to Dr. Michael Kaiser, associate chief medical officer at Louisiana State University's health care services division.
The information exchange was built with privacy safeguards, said Dr. Lynn Witherspoon, CIO at Ochsner Health System and a member of the LaHIE steering committee. For example, the online system tracks which physicians and nurses view each record. Physicians involved with the program say that electronic records generally are more secure than paper records, the Times-Picayune reports.
The information exchange has not yet gone live, and members of the group still are working to establish the details of the exchange, including how it will be paid for and sustained over time. So far, the six health care providers that developed LaHIE -- Baton Rouge Primary Care, Daughters of Charity Services, LSU, Ochsner and Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center -- can communicate through the portal. Access Health, a not-for-profit organization in Baton Rouge, La., will oversee the system.
Michael Butler, chief medical officer at LSU's health care services division, said, "The technical side pales in comparison to the rules that will govern who owns the data, what they can do with it, who is responsible to maintain it and what fees will be involved."
Dr. Roxane Townsend, deputy secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals, said that Louisiana is applying for federal funding to help physicians adopt the needed technology but that currently the funding is not available.
Also, the Louisiana Health Care Redesign Collaborative -- a state group that has been working in collaboration with the federal government to establish a new safety net for the uninsured -- has made health IT the basis of its plan. Physicians who want to participate in the safety net will be required to begin maintaining EHRs within one year (Moran, New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1/28).