A newly awarded federal grant will help a Montana health care consortium roll out a network to facilitate the exchange of health records throughout the rural state.
The three-year, $540,000 Rural Network Development Grant will continue the buildout of the Health Information Exchange of Montana (HIEM). The grant comes through the Health Resources and Services Administration and will be administered by that agency’s Office of Rural Health Policy.
HIEM consists of rural and frontier hospitals and clinics in Northwest and North Central Montana. The organization has petitioned for and is shortly expected to receive 501(c)(3) status. In the meantime, Glacier Community Health Center in Cut Bank, Mont., has handled the grant process on HIEM’s behalf.
The Rural Network Development Grant follows a $13.6 million grant from the Federal Communications Commission. That grant will support the creation of a fiber-optic network to link health care organizations participating in HIEM.
The FCC funding applies strictly to laying the fiber-optic lines, said John Maher, chief executive officer of the Glacier Community Health Center and president of the HIEM board. The $540,000 HRSA grant will cover hardware, the personnel costs associated with HIEM and the general operational costs of putting the network together, Maher said.
Another project involves the implementation of Informatics Corporation of America’s ICA Solution, which Maher said will provide a central software hub that consortium members can access. The ICA technology, originally developed at Vanderbilt Medical Center, integrates patient information.
HIEM began to emerge two and a half years ago when Glacier Community Health Center was awarded a planning grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration. That grant was to explore the creation of a regional organization that would share patient information across boundaries, Maher said. The award prompted discussions between the Glacier Community Health Center and the Kalispell Regional Medical Center, and the groups decided to formalize their collaboration under a corporate structure.
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.
