North Adams, Mass., in February plans to launch a citywide computer health network and become the first city in the U.S. where any physician and many nurses in the city can access the electronic health records from their offices, North Adams Regional Hospital or the visiting nurses association, the Boston Globe reports.
North Adams physicians will create complete EHRs with patients' most secure medical information that will be kept only on that physician's computer. However, community records -- which will contain patients' medications, test results, parts of their family and medical history, diagnoses and surgeries -- will be stored on a shared network and accessible across the city, according to the Globe.
The system will allow different levels of access to the community records for physicians, nurses and secretaries to prevent unauthorized data breaches. The system also tracks who accesses patients' records, and patients can request reports on who has accessed them. The medical information is stored in code that can be deciphered only by software on physicians' computers.
The communitywide network is being funded through a $50 million grant from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative is helping North Adams, as well as Newburyport and Brockton, to establish the networks and demonstrate their feasibility.
David Delano -- director of IT for Northern Berkshire Healthcare, which includes North Adams Regional -- said 80% of physicians will have EHRs by May.
Each family in the community had to sign a consent form to be entered into the system, and during the first month of learning to use the system, physicians saw between 20% and 50% fewer patients. The process of transferring the paper documents into the electronic system could take months or years to complete. One physician practice, Adams Internists, has refused to participate in the network, the Globe reports.
Transitioning to EHRs has been difficult in North Adams, which has about 75 physicians in private practice and one small hospital, so converting to EHRs in larger cities such as Boston is expected to be much more complicated, according to the Globe. Also, start-up costs likely will be a bigger concern for other communities, as North Adams used a grant to fund the project.
Physicians are developing an EHR system for Boston, although the plan probably will be more limited than the one North Adams implemented, according to Dr. John Halamka, CIO for Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Patients eventually might carry cards containing their health history, a step that would allow them to decide who can see their information, he added (Kowalczyk, Boston Globe, 1/30).