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Plan calls for medical info at the tap of a keystroke in Butte and southwest Montana

You’ve crashed your car and are unconscious, with no way to warn the emergency room doctors about your blood thinner medication or previous heart attacks: what do you do?

By Barbara LaBoe of The Montana Standard

http://www.mtstandard.com/articles/2004/10/20/newsbutte_top/hjjfijhjjchfge.txt

If organizers in Butte have their way in the future, it won’t be a problem. The doctors will simply access your most up-to-date medical records with a tap of a keyboard and a click of the mouse — no matter where in Butte or southwest Montana you’ve previously been treated.

The National Center for Healthcare Informatics, a joint venture between Montana Tech and St. James Healthcare, announced on Tuesday plans to form a Local Health Information Infrastructure, or a way for all areas of the medical field to quickly and securely share patient information.

"It ties together the hospitals, the clinics, the physicians, the insurance companies and the labs," said Ray Rogers, Tech’s director of college relations and marketing. "It ties everybody together … so that everyone within the medical community can share data in a secure environment and so that it can be accessed in a timely, efficient manner by the people who need it."

The LHII, the center’s first major project, is in the planning stages, but officials have high hopes, especially since it’s in line with President Bush’s directive creating a national coordinator of health information technology, said Rogers. Bush also called for a majority of Americans to have electronic health records within 10 years.

Partners from various health care organizations will help plan the LHII and its development, but Rogers said it ultimately could evolve into creating medical information cards each Butte resident could carry with them. Initially, though, the system would likely be a combination of a secure database and networking among healthcare providers.

Organizers plan to study similar operations in Indianapolis, Ind., and Santa Barbara, Calif., to determine what would best fit Butte’s medical community, Rogers said. They also plan to choose a steering committee and begin work on applying for a federal planning grant for the project. If that is successful, they could then apply for other federal grants to fund the system. At this point there are no firm estimates on what the planning or project would cost, Rogers said.

Being able to access records quickly, 24 hours a day should not only help patients receive better care, it could also cut down on the estimated 34,000 to 98,000 deaths nationwide each year due to inpatient medical errors, Rogers said. It is hoped that LHIIs can substantially reduce those numbers, he said.

Tech and the hospital jointly launched the informatics center as a way to train students in both medicine and technology, since the medical field increasingly depends on computers and other high-tech equipment. That program has had broad community support, which Rogers said they hope to build on for support of the LHII. One of the first goals is to demonstrate community support for the plan.

"We need to gather a commitment from the entire community to move forward with this," Rogers said. "The development of this is really going to be up to medical community in Butte. Our role at the center is to be to be a neutral third party to develop it for the community and make it very efficient and cost effective for them to be able to share in this type of information."

Reporter Barbara LaBoe may be reached via e-mail at [email protected] or by telephone at 496-5519.

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