By CAPITOL NEWS BUREAU
Published: Dec 11, 2007
The Federal Communications Commission has provided a $15.9 million grant aimed at giving doctors in Louisiana’s rural hospitals instant access to a patient’s electronic medical records, state health officials said Monday.
The grant will allow 109 not-for-profit hospitals to gain high-speed digital connections to transmit medical information, said the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
The DHH grant provides funding for participating hospitals to upgrade computer networks so they can connect to the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative.
LONI is a high-speed, fiber-optic network that connects supercomputing resources statewide.
The connection will provide the hospitals with the ability to share information.
The three-year FCC grant will provide DHH with $5.3 million a year to help hospitals purchase hardware and software necessary for the digital connections.
The ability to transmit medical information will be important in the event of another disaster such as Hurricane Katrina because doctors in one part of the state will be able to instantly transmit patient information to another part of the state.
If patients evacuate without taking along their medical information, as many did during Katrina, the network connections will allow doctors to continue current courses of treatment and access patients’ previous medical histories.
“Although we have recognized the importance of electronic health information for the past four years, Hurricane Katrina clearly demonstrated that paper records are not sufficient,” DHH Secretary Dr. Roxane Townsend said in a statement, “There is tremendous value in ensuring that a patient’s record is easily accessible by anyone providing care.”
Today, a doctor or hospital treating a new patient — someone from another community, for example — with a chronic health condition, such as diabetes, faces obstacles in getting the necessary health information for the patient, Townsend said.
The shared electronic medical records system should alleviate that, she said.
Publish Date:
01-03-2008
