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President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill provides a big opportunity for the Indianapolis-based Indiana Health Information Exchange to spread its expertise around the country.
The organization created a company called Mergetics Inc. last year to help other cities set up health information networks similar to the Indiana Health Information Exchange.
Obama’s bill, as it currently stands, would spend $1.7 billion to pay for doctors to buy electronic health record systems and another $300 million to help communities build health information exchange networks.
The money will certainly boost Mergetics’ efforts, said Exchange CEO Marc Overhage. But he added that more of the money must go toward health information networks in order to realize the potential improvements in quality, safety and cost that Obama and Congress are counting on. Policymakers hope that broad, computerized swapping of medical records could give doctors better information when treating patients and reduce costly prescription drug errors.
“If you have islands of electronic health records, you really haven’t got much,” Overhage said. But, he added, “You can accomplish a lot with health information exchange even before you have electronic health records deployed everywhere.”
The Indiana Health Information Exchange delivers patient health records and quality reports to doctors via the Internet, meaning doctors do not need a special electronic medical record system to receive the information. Adoption of such systems – which replace paper files – has been slow among doctors due to high costs and time lost for installation.
Overhage would like to see 80 percent of the stimulus money – or $1.6 billion – go toward building networks and helping hospitals and doctors automate their workflow processes. The rest could go to pay for doctors to add electronic health record systems.
Even if the funding stays as is, Overhage and the Exchange have been trying to raise their profile. They want the government agencies responsible for building out health information networks – at the federal, state and local levels – to follow Indiana’s model over any others.
Board members of the Exchange sent a letter to Congress on Jan. 12, extolling the Indiana network and calling for more funding for health information exchanges around the country.
The advantages for Indiana could be large. The Indiana Health Information Exchange is based on 35 years of work by the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute. If governments adopt different standards for swapping medical records and storing them, the head start Indiana now enjoys would be out the window.
Also, local life sciences leaders hope that Mergetics wins clients that want it to handle their medical records databases. Housing such information in Indianapolis would create a huge pool of information that could attract researchers and, perhaps, spawn life sciences companies.
Mergetics is a for-profit company and is independent from the not-for-profit Indiana Health Information Exchange. Mergetics’ CEO is Joe Meyer, a former vice president of marketing at Roche Diagnostics in Indianapolis.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity for us,” Overhage said.
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