by Brooke Bunch

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health is funding OU-COM to assist in the planning of an online medical records system designed to significantly upgrade health care for the underserved in Southeastern Ohio.

OU-COM is a partner in the Appalachian Regional Informatics Consortium (ARIC) Planning Project, which is aiming to provide improved patient care, reduce medical errors, control operating costs and promote academic research on rural medicine. The consortium is a part of the larger Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems Consortium, a group of almost 40 universities.

A $275,119 grant from the NLM was awarded to develop the electronic medical records system for health-care providers in the Appalachian region of Ohio, which includes Athens, Hocking and Vinton counties.

“Our ultimate goal is to achieve better patient care,” says Brian Phillips, the college’s chief information officer. Phillips is one of the co-authors of the grant and a principal investigator.

With a mission to improve access to medical information in rural Ohio by developing a model for an electronic information system, the ARIC project relies on the cooperation of a seven-member group that represents mental health-care and primary care providers and biomedical researchers.

The result will be an electronic system capable of providing shared information on medical records between health-care providers.

“Currently a lot of essential and necessary patient health information does not exchange hands unless a patient self-discloses,” says Roy Johnson, a former CORE administrator and now ARIC project manager.

Johnson says the current system involves the use of paper record keeping, a slow and time-consuming process.

“People spend enormous amounts of time keeping these records,” he says.

According to Phillips, physicians spend an average of 38 percent of their time and nurses spend 50 percent of their time charting medical records.

The new electronic system, designed to provide online access, will extensively reduce the use of paper records. 

“We’re going to put medical records on an electronic system and make access available for qualifying health-care providers,” Phillips says. “For example, physicians will be able to go online and access their patients’ records.”

According to Phillips, only nine percent of practices in the United States use electronic medical record systems.

“This is definitely cutting edge,” he says. “And not just because of the technology, but, more importantly, because of the development of the consortium and the unprecedented cooperation required for this project to succeed.”

Johnson says the project is unique because of the diversity of the participating organizations, which includes OU-COM, the College of Health and Human Services, the Edison Biotechnology Institute, Alcohol Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare Center, Doctors Hospital of Nelsonville, Health Recovery Services, O’Bleness Memorial Hospital, Southern Consortium for Children, Tri-County Mental Health and Counseling Services, and University Medical Associates.

“The participation of both primary care and behavioral health-care providers makes this a very unique project,” Phillips says.

Phillips says the implementation of such a system is very expensive, noting that usually only large health-care systems can afford it.

“No consortiums yet provide this type of practice and none are in rural areas,” he says. “We’re one of two organizations to receive NLM’s “Next Generation” program funding.”

Phillips says, ideally, the system will reduce the costs for physicians in the region and cap the cost for maintaining medical records.

The system should be mature in 10 years if all the goals are achieved, says Phillips.

“Right now we’re in the investigation period,” Johnson says. “This definitely has to take a phased approach.”

For more information on the project, visit www.oucom.ohio.edu/aric.