Medical Histories at Click of a Mouse?

Janice Cooper totes a pages-long list of her mother’s prescriptions every time she takes her to see the doctor.

With five doctors taking care of the 85-year-old, Cooper wants to make sure the physicians, including a neurologist and pulmonologist, have up-to-date information.

"I often get the feeling they don’t know what the other one is doing," said Cooper, who lives in Yarmouth. "I think it would help if they could coordinate more."

Under a system that’s in the early stages of development, Cooper wouldn’t have to worry. The system would let authorized doctors and other clinicians access a patient’s medical history instantly, from any computer in Maine.

It’s called the Maine Health Information Network Technology project, and it would feature more than medical records from a doctor’s office.

It also would include the prescription dispensed yesterday at the local pharmacy. The MRI you got out of town. The blood test done while you were out of the country.

Such information could be particularly helpful for an older or sicker patient with multiple doctors. It could be critical when someone is rushed to an emergency room and the doctor doesn’t have time to ask for a fax of medical records.

With the system in full swing, patients would be able to see their own medical records and work with their physicians to correct any inaccuracies or omissions, such as mention of an allergy.

"This holds tremendous promise for improving patient safety and quality of care," said James Harnar, the executive director of the Maine Health Information Center, the nonprofit health data organization that is directing the project.

He said the system would moderate the growth of health-care costs by avoiding duplicative tests and hospitalizations resulting from medical errors.

The project, which is expected to get its first trial runs in early 2007 and go statewide by 2010, comes as the federal government pushes the country toward electronic medical records. MORE EFFICIENT

A paperless system leaves less room to misread handwriting and allows for more efficient record-keeping and comprehensive analysis of patient information that could be used to personalize care.

In Maine, larger hospital systems already have adopted the technology, so data from doctors’ practices and laboratories in the system are easily accessible to one another.

But that wouldn’t be so helpful for the Portland resident who goes to both Maine Medical Center and Mercy Hospital, which are in different hospital systems. Or the patient who gets checkups at a one-doctor practice in Buxton but visits Portland for major procedures.

The new system would weave all of those separate medical records together, said Dr. Roderick Prior, who leads the project’s physician advisory committee and is the medical director at Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington.

A doctor’s office would not need electronic medical records to be able to tap into the data. But the program would work to optimal effect if all doctors’ practices had the technology and could contribute information to the project – a goal that is still years away.

"I expect, for at least a decade, it’s not going to be the sole source of information about patients. But 10, 20 years from now, it could be so good that it becomes the place where people get information and are so confident they won’t have to look elsewhere," Prior said.

FUNDING AT ISSUE

The program is still "many millions of dollars" away from implementation, Harnar said. The $380,000 that has been raised so far, for things such as a feasibility study, has come from his organization, the Maine Health Access Foundation and two state agencies, the Maine Bureau of Health and the Maine Quality Forum.

"At this stage, we don’t know where the rest of the funding is going to come from, though we are examining a lot of different sources," Harnar said. It’s also unclear whether participating doctors’ offices would pay any of the costs.

Money is only part of the challenge. Patients’ privacy is an overriding concern. And the project’s designers must find a way to make the system compatible with all electronic medical records systems so that a doctor who has just invested tens of thousands of dollars in a software package won’t have to buy a new one.

What’s working in the project’s favor is that Maine is a small state and its medical professionals know each other and are excited about the project, Harnar said.

Cooper said that if the project irons out privacy issues raised by the technology, she’s all for it. Too many times, she’s been worried that her mother would be hurt by a bad drug interaction.

"I just don’t want anything slipping through the cracks," she said.

Staff Writer Josie Huang can be contacted at 791-6364 or at:

jhuang@pressherald.com