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Business North - The Daily Briefing - Business Newspaper Online
Rural hospitals, primary care clinics get help with electronic records mandate
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5/4/2010 by Wayne Nelson |
The College of St. Scholastica and Duluth-based National Rural Health Resource Center are participants in a $21 million federal grant to help all rural hospitals in Minnesota and North Dakota make the federally mandated shift to electronic medical records by 2015. Urban and rural primary care clinics in the two states also are eligible.
The bi-state initiative includes a third partner, Stratis Health based in Bloomington, MN. Stratis Health has served Minnesota as its Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for nearly 30 years.
The three partners have a history of collaborating as Key Health Alliance, the grant recipient. This is the largest joint project they’ve undertaken to date, said Tami Lichtenberg, executive director of Scholastica’s Center for Healthcare Innovations. The college’s nursing and health sciences programs also are participating.
The money is part of the $24.1 billion included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment (stimulus) Act of 2009 for health information technology to introduce cost-saving efficiencies, help prevent medical mistakes, provide better care and identify best healthcare practices.
“We’re going to do the same work that 60 other groups are doing around the country,” said Marty Witrak, dean of Scholastica’s nursing program.
She said the healthcare industry’s mandate to improve care delivery and to begin rewarding providers for patient outcomes — and not just procedures — is stymied by its reliance upon paper record keeping and word-of-mouth evaluation practices.
“We need to join other industries, like banking, that already are using electronics,” she said.
Ron Berkeland, dean of Scholastica’s health and sciences department, said participating academic institutions also can produce students better prepared for health-related careers as a result of their participation.
Scholastica is developing the curriculum for the Key Health Alliance initiative that will begin rolling out by early June. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which awarded the grant, named Stratis Health as the grantee. Stratis will hire the consultants and staff who will take the program into rural hospitals and primary care clinics. The role of the National Rural Health Resource Center in Duluth will be to train those consultants and provide technical assistance, said Terry Hill, president.
He said the potential benefits to the targeted providers go well beyond avoiding the Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement penalties they face in 2015. While participating providers face a 10 percent match for the related costs, those that make the conversion from paper to healthcare IT by 2011 will receive bonuses of up to $48,000 per primary care physician on staff, he said. “The conversion to electronic medical records also will help them to recruit,” he said.
Nurse practioners and physicians assistants at those providers also are eligible for the bonuses, Witrak said.
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