Abstract
Many communities around the United States have substantial populations of uninsured families in need of acute and chronic health care. This presentation will describe the efforts of the non-profit Primary Care Coalition (PCC) of Montgomery County and its Community Health Link partners to provide access to high quality, culturally sensitive primary care and specialty care services for uninsured children and adults in Montgomery County, Maryland. Medical care for low income uninsured individuals is often constrained by inadequate infrastructure, lack of resources, cost constraints, and lack of access to needed technical skills. In particular, most "safety net" providers suffer from inadequate information systems to support direct patient care, much less systems to help them track outcomes and improve quality. Typically there is little commercial support as this is not a lucrative market for either software sales or commercial information technology services. This presentation will describe our Open Source enrollment based, encounter based, thin, broad, web based, extensible electronic medical record for primary care support. We will also describe our approach, including our collaborative assessment of safety net provider needs, the joint development of specifications and software, alpha and beta testing, and deployment strategies for a group of ten safety net provider sites geographically distributed across three jurisdictions. This project is also noteworthy for its collaborative contributions from multiple volunteer groups including the Community Health Link safety net providers, retired General Electric Information Systems executives and technical experts, and a wide variety of faith based and culturally and linguistically diverse individuals and organizations. Substantial funding was provided by a Community Access grant from the Bureau of Primary Health Care, Health Resources and Services Administration, US Department of Health and Human Services. |
