New York Healthcare Providers Seek State Funding for RHIO
Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs) get increased attention because they promise to make it possible for different physicians to access patient records from various locations. For instance, it is invaluable for hospital doctors to easily access prescriptions from their primary-care counterparts, especially in case of emergency when a patient has just been admitted and might not be coherent or even conscious. In this article the Times Union takes New York state as an example where $52 million are made available by the Department of Health under the HEAL NY program for information systems such as EMRs (Electronic Medical Records). 103 organizations have applied for grants (the deadline for phase 1 was November 30, 2005), with applications going from $50,000 to $10 million.
Within this framework, the Health Information Exchange of New York (a not-for-profit group founded by the New York State Health Plan Association) applied for a $9.5 million grant that would fund part of the development costs for an RHIO in the state. At a smaller scale, the exchange recently contributed to funding the Adirondack Regional Community Health Information Exchange in upstate New York. It remains to be seen how fast and how well such networks of networks will actually be implemented, let alone integrated at the national level to answer President Bush calls for a nationwide system to be in place by 2014.
February 28, 2006 Related topics: Partnerships & Consortia