Citywide EMR network to link nearly all area physicians

In a few months, all but one practice in three Massachusetts communities will be using electronic medical records systems.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Feb. 19, 2007.

A three-year effort to get electronic medical records in the hands of every doctor in three Massachusetts cities could bear fruit soon, with almost every one of 450 physicians expected to be on a networked EMR system by the start of summer.

The lone holdout in the Massachusetts e-Health Collaborative's effort is a four-doctor internal medicine practice in North Adams that said it wasn't ready to convert to an EMR. Otherwise, every practice and hospital in North Adams, Brockton and Newburyport will have an EMR connected to a citywide health network by June, though the cities themselves won't be connected to each other.

In North Adams, that process, which includes 75 physicians, was scheduled to be complete by the end of February.

The collaborative has worked since 2004 on this project. It received $50 million in funding from BlueCross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. The money was used to buy EMR software and hardware for physicians and hospitals in the three cities, as well as to hook them up into a network.

Many other parts of the country have created integrated networks, called regional health information organizations, or RHIOs. They are the backbone of President Bush's plan to have a national health network in place by 2014. The Massachusetts group believes, though, that it is the first to have virtually every practice and hospital linked.

Shared data on a centralized database will include medications, allergies, test results and diagnoses, said Micky Tripathi, the organization's CEO. But the system is set up so that physicians and hospitals do not actually tap into each others' systems, he said. Instead, the system will compile information and push it to a centralized database.