Many area hospitals, clinics working to digitize medical records
November 5, 2006
By MELISSA McEVER
The Brownsville Herald
November 5, 2006 - Say goodbye to written prescriptions, X-rays on film and paper records stuffed in a manila folder. Many of the Rio Grande Valley’s clinics and hospitals have entered the digital age.
Several area hospitals have launched multimillion-dollar projects to make all of their medical records paperless, eventually creating an electronic “one-stop shop” for a patient’s test results, MRIs, medical history, prescriptions, billing and more.
“The final goal is to make sure we have continuity of care for patients,” said Linda Resendez, chief ex-ecutive officer of Edinburg Regional Medical Center and Edinburg Children’s Hospital. “You’ll be able to see what the physician documented, what the nurse documented. The specialist can see it. The family doctor can pick up where the specialist left off. … It’s more efficient and effective health-care delivery.”
Local doctor’s offices and hospitals already have gone electronic in several aspects, including digital X-rays, billing and appointments. The next step is to tie those capabilities together in a centralized, truly paperless system, said Jim Barbaglia, chief information officer for Valley Baptist Health System.
“It’s a transformation to a higher level,” Barbaglia said. “We’ve gone in stages, and now we’re wrap-ping it into an integrated package.”
At Valley Baptist and many other hospitals, patients’ health information soon will be available for phy-sicians to access remotely using secure Internet access. Officials say they’re cognizant of privacy con-cerns and have the sites under tight security.
“The programs have accessibility limits. For example, our staff can’t read anything but registration information,” said Dr. Darryl White, Harlingen family-practice physician and chief medical information officer for Valley Baptist. “It’s really more private than a paper chart.”
Gov. Rick Perry and the Bush administration are pushing for hospitals and doctors’ offices to adopt electronic medical-records systems, citing reports that electronic records cut health-care costs and re-duce clinical errors.
Last month, Perry announced the creation of a new partnership, the Texas Health Care System Integ-rity Authority, which eventually will develop a centralized medical-records system for the entire state. The Bush administration committed $100 million in fiscal year 2005 and $125 million in fiscal year 2006 to help hospitals and clinics institute paperless systems.
The movement toward electronic records is long overdue, said Dr. Joseph Schneider, Dallas physician and a spokesman for Texas Medical Association.
“The evidence is out there from a quality standpoint that electronic medical records are the way to im-prove what we’re doing,” Schneider said.
Making the transition to a paperless system is a process that will take years to complete, some officials said.
“We want to make sure we do it right,” said Enrique Bernal, chief financial officer for Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville. “We have the foundation in place with an electronic (records) patient system … but some things are still handwritten.”
Like many other hospitals, Valley Regional already has electronic imaging and some patient data avail-able for physicians through a secure Web site. Currently, officials are working on granting “electronic signature” rights to doctors, allowing them to sign off on charts and order tests online. Just that step will greatly improve efficiency, Bernal said.
Bernal said he wasn’t sure when the hospital will have a fully electronic system because the decisions are coming from the hospital’s parent company, HCA Inc.
“They’re looking closely at every hospital and its needs,” he said.
The most time-consuming part of going electronic is “interoperability,” or making sure the various programs used in different parts of the clinic or hospital can communicate, officials said.
Valley Baptist is working to tie together several programs while also integrating a new system that al-lows some patients to register with the swipe of a card.
Barbaglia of Valley Baptist said the system’s two hospitals are in the “design phase” of the project. Elements of the electronic-records system will come online gradually, with the first major element scheduled for completion in 2008.
While hospitals take on these multimillion-dollar initiatives, small clinics and doctors’ offices are scrap-ing money together to make their records electronic also.
For some doctors’ offices, the only way to afford buying the necessary hardware and software was to take out a loan, but office managers said it’s an investment that will pay off.
“We’re able to track things more easily, and there are no more lost charts,” said Kristen Larson, office manager for Brownsville pediatrician Dr. Jorge Patiño. “It speeds things up, and it’s easy to access in-formation.”
The practice had to spend about $50,000 on a server, new hardware and a program to manage medical records, billing and appointments, Larson said. The office, which didn’t qualify for any federal grants, started using the program in June.
Medical-records software can range from about $10,000 to $50,000, depending on the bells and whistles, said Schneider of TMA.
“The $50,000 range is a Ferrari, and the Ferrari isn’t right for everybody,” he said.
More grants are becoming available for offices and clinics, and some hospitals and health plans have agreed to shoulder the cost for some of their physicians, Schneider said.
In the end, the gains to efficiency and accuracy make the cost worth it, said Yolanda Ochoa, who man-ages her husband Dr. Alfonso Ochoa’s practice in Weslaco.
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