It was the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe that further affirmed the wisdom of Community Health Integrated Partnership?s electronic patient record initiative.
“Those records were lost,” Salliann Alborn, chief executive officer of CHIP and the companion Maryland Community Health System, a managed care organization, said of disaster-area patient medical records destroyed in the 2005 hurricane. “That really brought to mind to us another of the virtues of a system like this.”
Alborn runs the $800,000, seven-employee, nonprofit administrative and information systems service for eight independent area community health centers. She also oversees the group?s pioneering, $2.9 million effort to computerize unwieldy paper medical records and integrate them into its existing automated registration, scheduling and billing system.
She predicts the effort, which will also bolster CHIP?s quality control functions for the 65-facility network across 13 counties and Baltimore City, will be up and running in 18 months. The network offers a range of sliding scale services to the underserved, including primary care, obstetrics, dental, psychiatric, prescription drug and medical outreach to the state?s migrant-worker populations. Cumulatively, it conducts about 86,000 consultations a year.
“Our electronic health records system is a major initiative,” Alborn said. “It is really extraordinary for eight separate corporate entities to come together and agree on system specifications, functionality and a software vendor. They?re all going to work together to create this integrated health record system. It?s an extraordinary thing for people in Maryland.”
Established in 1996, when Maryland implemented its Medicaid managed care program, Glen Burnie-based CHIP seeks to centralize common administrative functions among member centers, improving efficiencies and economies of scale while also enhancing the quality of health care delivery to the state?s 12Medicare/Medicaid patients and estimated 800,000 uninsured.
The organization also facilitates the accreditation of member centers and providers through liaison with the nationally recognized Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Health Care Organizations.
“They are an extremely competent, mission-oriented group of people and it?s a pleasure working with them,” Patricia Cassatt, executive director of the Baltimore-based member People?s Community Health Centers, said of CHIP. “And we all can?t wait for electronic health records. It will solve a lot of problems … and will be the first data repository in the state for uninsured claims information.”
