: As the three members of a small, rural healthcare consortium, the applicants will utilize existing Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) standards to integrate their current incumbent, stand-alone databases and information systems to share patient information more effectively. They will then use this as a basis for creating a seamless, comprehensive Electronic Health Record, utilizing applications compliant with those standards, to make integration possible throughout their Consortium. From this project, they will discover how healthcare providers and staff in this Consortium may then use this seamless, longitudinal record system to improve overall patient care and efficiency, beta-testing its uses in the real world so they can then move on to implementation to scale the system up when this planning project is completed, to then be used by everyone working in the Consortium. The new Healthcare Information Technology system will allow real-time access to medical records and information, portability to numerous common devices and interfaces, reduction in overall costs, enhanced collaboration with healthcare organizations, government agencies, payers and other third parties, allow medication tracking and on-line ordering, allow electronic, real-time orders by physicians and other healthcare providers, give patients the ability to access protected health information on the Internet and allow providers to manage that access for security. It will also reduce information-related errors in treatment and overall care. Working with a carefully selected Consortium Research Team made up of a group of their Healthcare providers and Information Technology staff members, they will use accepted scientific practices in a comprehensive program of training, testing, evaluation and research to develop systems to reach these goals and to be scalable and repeatable elsewhere so that what they learn here will help other healthcare professionals in similar situations throughout the nation. ? ?
