nyc singled out as having great health IT

Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), a healthcare technology lobbying group, has singled out NYC's Primary Care Information Project (PCIP) as a potential model for future health IT projects across the nation.

The recent stimulus package offered a financial incentive to those providers who incorporate a "meaningful use" of health IT into their practices by 2011. To facilitate this, the government proposed establishing regional IT centers to support providers making the transition to electronic medical records (EMRs). PCIP, HIMSS argues, is a perfect model for just such a regional IT center.

PCIP was established in 2007 by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. It currently targets providers looking to use EMRs who serve large groups of patients who rely on public insurance. PCIP helps them transition to EMRs by bulk purchasing eClinicalWorks, an EMR software, and contracting with its makers to provide two years of support to the providers who opt to use it. PCIP itself also works with these providers, developing trainings for the software, and evaluation rubrics that providers can access to assess how well they are using the software.

PCIP boasts a high level of buy in from targeted providers. The director of PCIP, Farzad Mostashari, told HIMSS, “We have been able to reach Medicaid providers in the city’s poorest neighborhoods in Harlem, the South Bronx, central Brooklyn...With the smallest practices that nationally have a 2 percent implementation rate of electronic health records, 53 percent of them are in our project.”

The practice I'm at for clinical uses eClinicalWorks, and it seems great to me. While I have never used any other EMR, and so can only compare it to paper charting, the difference between those two is huge. The program makes it incredibly easy to access notes from previous appointments, healthcare maitenance information like immunization status, and personal and familial medical histories, and to apply them immediately. Paper charts leave you fumbling for such information, and often present it in fragments so it's difficult to use in the moment.