June 10--File cabinets filled with paper medical records are disappearing across the Capital Region.
About 50 percent of physicians now use electronic records, including all the area's hospitals and nearly all large physician practices.
"We are at the tipping point," said Dr. John Bennett, president of CDPHP. "We have the opportunity to make this an electronically connected community like none other."
Bennett spoke Thursday about sharing medical information at a forum hosted by Health Information Xchange New York, a nonprofit group that facilitates the exchange of medical data.
The silos of paper records have been torn down, but there is a new challenge: "Now we have electronic silos," said Scott Momrow, vice president of HIXNY.
Hospitals, doctors and insurers use different computer systems to store the records. Each system has its own definitions for medical information and its own interface for displaying the data. Sharing information between systems is far from easy. But those barriers are starting to fall.
First, the federal government is offering financial incentives for doctors and health systems to adopt electronic records. To get the money, they must use national standards for sharing data. Second, groups like HIXNY are working to make the information exchange easier. And third, doctors and patients want it.
HIXNY currently has 1.7 million patient records and 500 registered users who access an average of 15,000 patient records each month.
Lisa Greenwald, a nurse practitioner at Schuylerville Family Health, is one of them.
She recently examined a 32-year-old man who had gone to the hospital with chest pains and had a follow-up appointment with her. She called the records department at the hospital to find out what the ER doctors had done. She reached an answering machine.
So she logged on to HIXNY's website and looked up her patient. She found his lab work, stress test and hospital discharge summary.
Greenwald said she is not computer savvy and avoided electronic records, but in the end, it took her 30 minutes to learn how to navigate the system.
"It's pretty easy if you are not afraid to click around," she said.
Logging onto the HIXNY website and searching for patient data takes a few minutes -- more time than doctors and their staff can spare. HIXNY and other information technology providers hope to speed up the information exchange.
HIXNY is developing a "bi-directional" exchange in which record systems push and pull patient information. So when doctors log on to their office computers on Monday morning, they can see patients who went to the hospital over the weekend and view lab results without logging on to an outside service.
Albany Medical Center recently tested a method for communicating with other organizations using four different computer systems. The experiment involved a common practice: a doctor sending a patient to a specialist.
In the pilot test, the information was shared seamlessly, meaning the referral request showed up in the specialist's own computer system, and the specialist's report flowed back to the referring doctor.
If this were iTunes, both doctors would have copies of the same song but neither had to download it from the Apple store -- it all happened automatically, behind the scenes.
The project was successful and George Hickman, Albany Med's chief information officer, is hopeful that newer Electronic Health Records systems will incorporate the technology.
"The world is going to start shifting toward this," Hickman said.
Reach Cathleen F. Crowley at 454-5348 or ccrowley@timesunion.com. Visit her blog at http://blogs.timesunion.com/healthcare.
Information exchange
Hospitals, physician practices and insurers that share their patient data with Health Information Xchange New York include:
*Albany Medical Center
Albany Memorial Hospital
Ellis Medicine
Saratoga Hospital
*Glens Falls Hospital*Samaritan Hospital
Seton Health/St. Mary's
CapitalCare Medical Group
Prime Care Physicians
Community Care Physicians
*Whitney Young Health Services
CDPHP
MVP
HealthNow
Source: HIXNY.
* Will begin sharing data this year.
-----
To see more of the Times Union, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.timesunion.com.
Copyright (c) 2011, Times Union, Albany, N.Y.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com.
NYSE:AIN,