The follow press release appeared a day or two ago.
FSSA Announces Indiana Flood Victims eHealth Support Center
INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) announced the creation of the Indiana Flood Victims eHealth Support Center (1-877-788-5888) as a part of the relief effort for disaster victims across the state. This support center will provide doctors with medical information of flood victims, to the extent obtainable, for treatment purposes. FSSA is leading the effort between the Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), who is handling the calls, and Electronic Data Systems (EDS).
“Governor Daniels called upon state government to assist the disaster victims in any and all ways possible. The support center is just one of several initiatives taking place to help Hoosiers get back on their feet,” said FSSA Secretary Mitch Roob. “With the eHealth Support Center, we will be able to give providers all the information we have available in a timely manner, resulting in a higher quality of care for patients.”
Medical information is being made available through the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC). The INPC is a secure clinical data repository that is populated with healthcare information in collaboration with central Indiana hospitals, outpatient centers, pharmacies, imaging centers, laboratories, public health departments and insurance providers.
“We are pleased to be able to support flood evacuees and their doctors in this time of need,” said Dr. J. Marc Overhage, Director of Medical Informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and President/CEO of the Indiana Health Information Exchange. “The ability to provide medical information that would otherwise be lost or inaccessible is going to make a difference in the care of many Hoosiers. We applaud FSSA in making this collaboration a reality.”
Calls will be taken 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Requests that are made to the Indiana Flood Victims eHealth Support Center (1-877-788-5888) during business hours (7:00am – 5:00 pm EST) will be processed within one hour. Calls made after hours will be processed the next business day.
For additional information about the eHealth Support Center, patients and physicians should visit: www.ihie.com/indianaflood. For more information on disaster relief efforts visit: www.emergency.in.gov .For more information about FSSA, visit: www.fssa.in.gov. For more information about EDS, visit: www.eds.com . Additional information about the Indiana Health Information Exchange may be found at: www.ihie.com. Information about the Regenstrief Institute is available at: www.regenstrief.org.
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This is really a good thing to see the infrastructure be quickly brought into action to support those who have been displaced and possibly separated from their usual services and carers. This is, of course, what did not happen with Cyclone Katrina.
One can only hope planning to deliver such services is part of the disaster planning that is undertaken in Australia – given the bad run we have had with cyclones and the like recently.
David.
4 comments:
Your readers may not know that the Regenstrief Medical Records System (RMRS) is the nation's only citywide electronic medical records system which currently allows emergency department physicians, with the patient's permission, to view as a single virtual record all previous care at any of 18 participating hospitals.
In concluding you said “One can only hope planning to deliver such services is part of the disaster planning that is undertaken in Australia.”
There is not a single scerrick of hope that Australia could mount such a response because the infrastructure and the systems simply do not exist and will not be in place for well into the future.
Given the rate at which technology advances occur it is fair to say that when the day comes that we in Australia are able to provide wide access to information, as occurred in Indiana, it will be through access to consumer managed Personal Health Records rather than a hospital wide network of hospital Medical Records.
The operative word is 'SINGLE' virtual record.
One assumes from this that:
- there is one consistent record number used for the patient and their record anywhere and everywhere. Not a state of enlightenment we are able to enjoy in Australia even in one State or one City.
Of course Regenstreif is hospital-wide and hospital-based and does not include ambulatory care and presumably clinicians external to the hospital network cannot access patient data from their consulting desktop.
The Sydney Southwest Area Health Service is a fair way along this path.
For a typical patient, the following information is available as a single view on a Cerner-based system:
- discharge and ED summaries since about 2005
- pathology since about 2002 (and anatomical pathology from the late 1990s)
- imaging reports since the late 1990s
- aged care assessment documents since about 2006
- some recent outpatient documents
(with all dates varying according to the hospital sourcing the records). It's not (yet) a full electronic record system, but it is vastly better than nothing.
All the hospitals in the system are progressively being integrated: Royal Prince Alfred, Concord and Liverpool are the tertiary hospitals, and all the primary and secondary ones are progressively being brought in. Electronic medication management is in pilot at Concord.
The single view seems to be created by setting up of linkages between the medical record numbers of the various hospitals. Presumably there is a SSWAHS-wide unique identifier behind the linked records, but that isn't generally visible on the clinical views.
Access is from all hospitals and some associated specialist consulting rooms. Lack of access by GPs in the surrounding area is the most obvious gap.
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