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HEALTH CARE: North Bay dives into digital medical records

HEALTH CENTERS, COALITION, HOSPITALS IMPLEMENT SYSTEMS TO TRACK CARE

In 2004, President Bush issued an executive order asking health care providers to transfer all patient records to an electronic format by 2014, praising the efficiency and safety of going paperless.

Though few could dispute some advantages to such a system so common to other industries adjusting to the digital revolution, health care leaders have little or no historical reference to help them create the infrastructure from scratch.

But in the coming months, North Bay health leaders will embark on a wave of electronic record projects, including plans to create a region-wide system.

In about a week, West County Health Centers will open a new clinic in Sebastopol that will pilot the first part of a $12 million, region-wide medical records system. The Redwood Community Health Coalition, with help from Kaiser Permanente and other grants, developed the project that will eventually be accessible to 18 clinics in Napa, Marin, Sonoma and Yolo counties. The Sebastopol site will serve as a testing ground, and other centers will go online in the coming months starting with Southwest Community Health Center in Santa Rosa.

“This system is really exceptional because we will be able to better quantify and manage disease populations and their treatments,” said Southwest CEO Naomi Fuchs.

“Especially with chronic disease patients, we can track which treatments have been successful and what the demographics are of those with the disease,” she said.

To expand the community group’s vision, Sonoma Health Access Coalition has created a subcommittee that is near completing a draft it hopes will promote a system similar to the clinic’s, but including every Sonoma County patient.

“The more aggregate data you have, the easier it is to make a decision on how to treat a patient,” said Fe Sendaydiego, a member of the Access Coalition subcommittee and information systems manager for Sonoma Valley Hospital.

Ms. Sendaydiego is also in the process of applying for a $5 million grant to begin medical record system upgrades at the Sonoma hospital and others in a joint powers agreement, including Healdsburg District Hospital, Mendocino Coast District Hospital and Palm Drive Hospital in Sebastopol.

She said the group hopes to eventually link with Marin Medical Practice Concepts Group, which was formed in 1996 as a way to share a records system across area medical groups. Since then, the concepts group has connected with other health care organizations besides physician groups, including Marin General Hospital.

“The more you coordinate these upgrades, the more cost effective it is,” she said. “Also, with so many different [software] options, you avoid the risk of having many incompatible systems that could never be connected.”

Sutter Health facilities in the North Bay have systems in place to track pharmacy and other patient records.

St. Joseph Health System, which is located in California, Texas and New Mexico, is also currently in the process of unrolling an updated system as part of what officials call Care Redesign.

Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa will be among the first to implement the upgrades, which will digitize almost all information and make the records more efficiently accessible systemwide.

The hospitals use herds of COWs, or “computers on wheels,” for assessments and nurse documentation that was formerly all paper.

Kaiser Permanente is known as a pioneer in electronic records implementation, booting its first vastly accessible record system in the Hawaii region in 2004.

Last week, the company’s Santa Rosa campus premiered its latest upgrades during a tour.

The company also has another option for members called My Chart, where patients can access certain medical record information from a secure Web portal.

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Submit items for this column to Ashley Verrill at 707-579-2900 ext. 215, averrill@busjrnl.com or fax 707-579-8475.

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