The California Regional Health Information Organization (CalRHIO) received a $1 million grant today from Sutter Health, which seeks to help small and rural communities gain access to a future statewide health information exchange.
CalRHIO officials said the deal is part of a multimillion-dollar commitment by Sutter, a 26-hospital, not-for-profit health care system, "to further pass along savings from tax-exempt bonds to health care consumers.”
As part of its application to the California State Treasurer’s Office and the California Health Facilities Financing Authority for nearly $1 billion in tax-exempt bond financing earlier this year, Sutter “committed to investing an additional $8.5 million over six years in technology grants to provide support to rural hospitals for electronic health technology system connectivity and in support for community clinics in Northern California,” according to a company statement.
The grant will help safety-net organizations by giving them “a viable alternative to creating and managing their own [health information exchange] projects, as well as ensure interoperability and privacy protection across the state," according to a company statement.
CalRHIO said the deal offers "communities that want to enable their health care providers to exchange information an alternative to building and financing their own infrastructure."
The exchange will operate as a utility, offering services to health care providers, patients, government agencies and other RHIOs in California. The network can be used for local data exchanges or to link existing exchanges with one another.
Dr. Don Holmquest, CalRHIO's president and chief executive officer, said the grant would help “ensure that patients being seen anywhere in the state, regardless of where health care services are delivered, will have the most complete information possible available to their care provider. This is especially important for patients with chronic diseases and in an emergency."
State Treasurer Bill Lockyer, who approved the grant, called the assistance to rural and small hospitals “a primary objective of the financing agreement my office reached with Sutter. This grant represents a good down payment from Sutter toward fulfilling that commitment."
In late March, CalRHIO picked Medicity and Perot Systems to help build a planned $300 million health information exchange. Hewlett-Packard joined the CalRHIO project in May. CalRHIO said at the time that the contractor team’s first step would be to help the organization find $300 million in private financing to launch the exchange.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
