UB is teaming up with an international information technology company to correct some long-standing communication problems in the field of medicine.
The New York State Department of Health gave the university a $7 million grant to implement a completely electronic record keeping system between the private practicing doctors of UBMD, a group of 450 physicians that are part of the UB faculty.
The grant is part of a federal initiative from the Obama administration to improve and modernize health care across the country.
Russell Bessette, M.D., associate vice president for Health Sciences and director of Health Information Technology, is overseeing a large part of the project from his office in the Center for Excellence in downtown Buffalo.
According to Bessette, the project aims to organize all physicians in the U.S. on the same type of electronic health records system.
'If a person were to be traveling and injured somewhere, they would be able to go into a local emergency room and have their records accessible,' Bessette said.
In order to do this, UB has teamed up with the information technology company CTG, a global corporation based in Buffalo.
CTG is providing an additional $6.1 million to develop the software necessary for the new system, in hopes that they will later successfully market the software throughout the country.
Although those involved in the project are expecting that the electronic records system will be implemented statewide and eventually nationwide, the focus right now is on creating a system to interconnect the private practicing doctors of UBMD.
'As a test group, those 450 doctors are being placed on the same electronic health record,' Bessette said. 'If you can't send the records from New York City to Buffalo, that's somewhat understandable, but if you can't send the records within the same building or within [UBMD], that's really tough to understand. So the first thing is to get those records organized within just here in the city.'
According to Bessette, the benefits of having an electronic record of a patient's complete medical history – which could be confidentially shared between physicians – would be countless.
The system would provide the primary doctor with a better overall view of the patient's health, inform paramedics of allergies in emergency situations and avoid the repetition of diagnostic procedures that could pose health risks, he said.
'If you come into a hospital and have chest pains, you might be having a heart attack,' Bessette said. 'But if they have to do tests, stick needles in you and run catheters, those are dangerous tests. If you just had the test last month, you don't want to go through it again. So having access to the information can not only save money, but it can also help people to not get injured.'
In an attempt to iron out the kinks on a smaller level first, Bessette and his colleagues have chosen to concentrate on the electronic record keeping of kidney disease. According to Bessette, there are a number of reasons why kidney disease was the appropriate choice.
'We picked [kidney disease] because it's very debilitating. People are very sick when they have it. It affects a lot of people, and it's very, very expensive,' Bessette said. 'The average cost in New York State for people who have kidney disease is about $124,000 a year, so it's a big ticket item.'
When applied to patients with kidney disease, the goal is to have complete electronic records available to make it more clear to the primary care provider when the disease is progressing into a more serious, and expensive, stage – at which point the appropriate measure can be taken to slow its progression, Bessette said.
In the future, Bessette expects the health care field to apply the electronic records system to other major illnesses, eventually covering all people's medical histories universally.
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