The region is donning another leadership mantle these days as a nationwide leader in adopting electronic health records.
So-called EHRs are potentially a life-saving and economically beneficial change, said Eugene Heslin, an MD in Saugerties who testified before a Congressional subcommittee July 20 about his experience implementing EHRs at his six-physician Bridge Street Medical Group.
Heslin fills many medical roles, but in all of them he is helping spread the EHR message across the region and beyond. Â He serves as board chairman of the Hudson Valley Health Alliance, which was created to combine the services of the Kingston, Benedictine and Margaretville hospitals into a unified health provider.
Heslin is also a founding board member of the Taconic Health Information Network and Community (THINC), the nonprofit, local convener of health care organizations that is helping drive adoption of EHR in the Hudson Valley. THINC is part of the Hudson Valley Initiative in collaboration with Taconic IPA and MedAllies Inc. to support adoption of health IT in the Hudson Valley.
Taconic IPA is a physician association with 4,000 members dedicated to innovative change to medical practices. MedAllies Inc. of Fishkill is a physician-founded and operated company dedicated to helping medical practitioners convert their offices from paper records to EHR, a change that affects medical operations financially and in other ways.
Financial considerations are important, said A. John Blair, president of Taconic IPA, and CEO of Med Allies. Blair said that for a practice like Heslin”™s with six physicians it costs about a quarter of a million dollars over five years to switch to EHRs from a paper-based practice.
The Obama administration initiative that is having the most impact convincing medical practitioners to adopt EHR is not the health care reform act passed in March 2010, but the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, widely known as the stimulus bill. That is because ARRA sets aside billions of dollars in incentives in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to encourage physicians and medical institutions to adopt EHR
The money will be available to physicians who can demonstrate “meaningful use” of health care information technology and EHRs in their practice. The federal government July 13 issued a final rule on what constitutes meaningful use, with 25 measures, of which 15 core measures must be adopted, while doctors can choose to adopt at least five of the remaining 10. The measures include such items as having a patient”™s prescription list available electronically, with warnings against allergies and an ability to transfer such data electronically.
Heslin, in his July 20 testimony, told about the life-saving importance of having such capability, relating a recent call at 3 a.m. regarding an elderly male patient who was taken to a hospital by ambulance and was disoriented and growing worse. ER personnel read Heslin the list of prescriptions the patient was supposedly receiving. But because he had access to both the patient and his wife”™s medical records, even from his home in the wee hours, Heslin realized that the disoriented patient had given paramedics his wife”™s prescription sheet. With the mistake discovered and corrected, the patient was able to recover.
Blair, of MedAllies in Fishkill, said that such instances are only one reason why EHRs are so important; they also potentially provide better coordination across specialties and better preventive care.
And he said, in the Hudson Valley is leading the way. “If you look at national averages, the Hudson Valley is way out in front,” said Blair. He said 40 percent of Hudson Valley primary care physicians are using EHRs. “That”™s about double the national average,” he said.
