Grant To Enable Electronic Health Records Research in SC
Posted by ams at 25 OCT 9:45 am Share
Duke Endowment renews funding for statewide health care initiative
COLUMBIA, S.C. –
A statewide biomedical research collaborative will use a grant, announced Wednesday, to continue searching for better ways to deliver health care and spreading that knowledge to the state’s hospitals.
Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) will receive $11.25 million, as the organization is working toward all hospitals using electronic medical filing systems.
HSSC has brought together researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina and Clemson University as well as the state’s seven teaching hospital systems since 2004. The program received a first grant of $21 million from the Duke Endowment, which serves both North and South Carolina, in 2006.
HSSC President and CEO Dr. Jay Moskowitz said that on top of collaborating to find solutions, the group partners with the South Carolina Hospital Association to get new standards of best practices used across the state right away.
“When we get that information it goes to the South Carolina Hospital Association and it goes to every single hospital in South Carolina,” Moskowitz said. “We have the partnerships so we can get information out as soon as possible so there is no lag in what we can do versus what is happening at the curbside at a physician office.”
One issue that network has already helped solve is hospital infection rates in patients who need central IV lines.
“HSSC has managed to bring everyone together to come up with solutions,” Moskowitz said. “Now every one of our hospitals has a lower infection rate than the national average, so that’s a wonderful accomplishment.”
Currently the organization is looking at the best ways for all of the state’s health care providers to use electronic filing systems to securely share patient data, by engaging informatics researchers at MUSC, an operations group at USC and Clemson Information Technology experts who focus on storage, privacy and security.
“We need to get all the hospitals to the point where there’s meaningful use of the systems out there and that would be e-prescribing, so there would no longer be a written script. This would be sent directly to the pharmacy of the patient’s choice so there would be very few mistakes. It would also have a listing of allergies and the person’s history for a specific disease.”
Amy Martin, the Deputy Director of the South Carolina Rural Health Research Center, works with HSSC to see how rural hospitals fit into research and developing care plans and said that properly using electronic filing would benefit rural patients the most.
“Most people in this state use their local hospitals, but there are times that small rural hospital cannot provide the level of care a patient needs, say if they are recovering from a stroke or need an Intensive Care Unit, so they get transferred to bigger hospitals,” Martin said. “But when you jump from system to system that opens an opportunity for integral info needed to manage the patient’s care to get lost or not follow that person in its entirety.”
She said that though the vast majority of the state’s hospitals have or are working on electronic filing systems, being able to quickly share more uniform electronic information will help patients get the specialized care they need at larger institutions, and make for better discharge plans back at home when their records go back the other way.
The South Carolina Health Information Exchange (SCHIEx) is currently in beta testing she said, but gives doctors a better way to share information, and is not a database for any physician to access.
Neither she nor Moskowitz could predict when the system might be used statewide.
Source: www2.wspa.com
