Appalachian Regional Informatics Consortium awarded grant
April 4, 2005
The Appalachian Regional Informatics Consortium (ARIC) Planning Project recently received an additional $100,000 from the discretionary funds of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health to implement a high-speed, fiber-optic backbone to connect providers, enabling larger files, such as X-rays, lab results and EKG readings, to be transferred in a more timely fashion.
"The $100,000 was a nice surprise," Brian Phillips, Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine (OU-COM) chief information officer, said in a press release. Phillips is one of the co-authors of the grant and a principal investigator. OU-COM is a partner in ARIC.
"It will be used for the installation of a high-speed, fiber-optic link between OU-COM, O'Bleness Memorial Hospital and the Athens campus of Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare," he said in the release.
The money is in addition to a $275,119 grant from NLM, which was awarded to fund development of an electronic medical records system for health-care professionals in the Appalachian region -- Athens, Hocking and Vinton counties. ARIC hopes to facilitate improved patient care in southeastern Ohio -- a key part of which is the reduction of medical errors -- as well as to control operating costs and promote academic research on rural medicine.
"Our ultimate goal is to achieve better patient care," Phillips said in the news release.
With a mission to improve access to medical information in rural Ohio by developing a model for an electronic information system, ARIC entails the cooperation of a consortium representing both primary and behavioral health-care providers and biomedical researchers.
The result will be an electronic system providing shared information on medical records between health-care providers.
"Currently medical records do not exchange hands," Roy Johnson, OU-COM project manager, said in the news release.
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 will eliminate the use of paper records, evolving into an online system.
"We're going to put medical records on an electronic system and make access available for qualifying health-care providers," Phillips said in the release. "For example, physicians will be able to go online and access their patients' records."
Electronic medical record systems are currently set up in only 12 percent of practices, Phillips said.
"This is definitely cutting edge," he said in the release. "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."
The diversity in the types of organizations participating, Johnson said, includes OU-COM, the College of Health and Human Services, Edison Biotechnology Institute, Alcohol Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services, Appalachian Behavioral Healthcare, Doctor's 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.
Phillips said implementation of such a system is 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 said in the release. "We're one of two organizations to receive NLM's 'Next Generation' program funding."
Phillips said ideally the system will reduce the costs for physicians in the region and cap the cost for maintaining medical records.
He said they hope to receive an additional $1.6 million in the coming year to begin implementation. The system should be mature in 10 years if all the goals are achieved.
For more information on the project, visit http://www.oucom.ohio.edu/aric.
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