Mississippi Medicaid funds statewide EHR
By Heather Hayes
Friday, August 07, 2009
The Mississippi Division of Medicaid has awarded a four-year contract worth $8 million to Shared Health, Inc., to build and operate a statewide electronic health record (EHR), an e-prescribing application and clinical decision support tools to improve patient care coordination and patient safety for its estimated 600,000 beneficiaries. Medicaid officials expect the system to be operational by the end of the year.
The EHR will connect about 900 physicians with Web-based access to patient health summaries, including demographics, recent diagnoses, hospital discharge information, lab results, allergies, medication history and immunization records. The system will be integrated with e-prescribing, which will provide physicians with a patient’s current medications, drug interaction data and appropriate generic alternatives.
“This will really give physicians that longitudinal view of the patient’s history that’s needed to reduce redundant testing, improve communication and reduce costs and allow the physician to provide more effective chronic disease and population management,” said Linda Matern, chief operating officer for Shared Health, noting that the Chattanooga-based company will also provide clinical outreach services to Medicaid physicians to help them with their own adoption of EHR systems.
The statewide system will reside at secure facilities run by Shared Health and its partners. Medicaid will provide patient claims data to Shared Health, which will rely on analytics engines and other tools to standardize the data and present it to physicians in a format relevant for their clinical needs.
Mississippi Medicaid, which still has a legacy Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS), is making its first foray into digital records across the Medicaid beneficiary base with this effort.
The State of Mississippi, which wants to develop and implement a statewide health information exchange as quickly has possible, has other health IT initiatives underway. These include the development of a medication error reporting system for rural hospitals and the eHealth Information Support Network (eHISN), which will provide a clinical data repository containing continuity of care records for six coastal counties that are at risk for hurricane-related disaster.
