application): This project will produce a viable and sustainable plan for the implementation of a regional health record system within established networks of rural hospitals, clinics, public health providers, behavioral health providers, and others across a 14,000-square-mile remote area. The regional health records planning project has the following aims: 1) The regional health record plan will delineate a standards-based, coherent, scalable, and achievable technology solution with a particular focus on identifying the most appropriate organizational structure to promote sustainability of the technology infrastructure in consideration of the unique constraints imposed by the economics of the rural environment. 2) The plan will articulate the tangible and intangible value proposition for individual organizational partners, the critical access network, and the regional community. 3) The plan will include all hospitals within a regional critical access health network and will extend to all health clinic and behavioral health providers. 4) The planning process will include participation from all levels of leadership from participating partners. And, 5) the planning process will work within existing collaborative and information channels to ensure scalability and extensibility to other key healthcare providers, such as bioterrorism, public health, and other safety net providers. The project will provide guidance to other critical access hospital networks desiring to implement regional health record sharing. The project will extend to behavioral health providers and others in the regional care community and will model interconnections with other healthcare and services providers toward a vision of regional health records in the context of community care and public health. The plan will model a solution applicable to small hospitals across the nation because the plan will accommodate the wide variability in technological capacity and readiness represented by the partnering organizations. Project partners include all the area's hospitals, the public health entity, a membership organization of nearly all health and human services providers, and the University of Nebraska.
