By ERIN MILLER
By ERIN MILLER
Stephens Media
Big Island hospitals and doctors are finally seeing the pieces of a $16 million federal stimulus award come together.
The end result of the program will be more hospitals and doctors’ offices using electronic health records. Kona Community Hospital will be the last of the island’s three large hospitals to integrate such a system, with a target start date of Nov. 1, but it’s also the first of the state hospitals doing so with a program the state purchased. Hilo Medical Center purchased its own program.
Hawaii County was one of 17 communities across the country, and the only completely rural location, to receive one of the Beacon Community program awards, Dr. Alistair Bairos said. Bairos is the care redesign manager for the project, overseeing efforts at Kona Community Hospital, Hilo Medical Center and North Hawaii Community Hospital to hire care coordinators, people who will work with patients as they are being discharged to make sure those patients understand doctors’ instructions, how to take medication and have follow up appointments, if needed, with their primary care doctors.
One of the program goals is to reduce the rate at which patients are readmitted to the hospital after discharge. An elderly patient, for example, may be treated by a doctor at the hospital, given new prescriptions, in addition to the prescriptions the patient is already taking, and may go home confused about which medications to take. That person may then end up back in the hospital in less than 30 days. But Hawaii’s readmission rate is already significantly lower than the national average, Bairos said. The national figure is about 20 percent, while Hawaii’s average is 8 percent.
The Kona hospital got $170,000 to hire care coordinators.
Hospitals are also moving to electronic health records and tying in to a Health Information Exchange. Laurie Bass, Beacon’s health information exchange and health information technology manager, said the exchange will make patients’ records available to any doctor, wherever the patient is being seen.
When talking about the exchange, Bass uses herself as an example of how patients may benefit.
Bass is allergic to penicillin, and if she were taken to a hospital unconscious, a physician may give her a dose of the drug. That, she said, could kill her. Having an electronic record any doctor may access will prevent that from happening, she said.
“It will increase the care you’re given by the physician,” she said.
The electronic records may also decrease the need for patients to fill out the same forms at multiple doctors’ offices, because their health history will be accessible through the exchange.
Such records will also decrease medical care costs, Bass said.