By Ryan Morden
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wrvo/local-wrvo-909966.mp3
Syracuse, NY – Everyone has an emergency room nightmare story. Rob Hack's son - an avid soccer player - dislocated his knee and had to get a bunch of x-rays and MRIs from a family doctor.
He says when it happened the second time: "we had to go to the hospital and they had to figure out what was wrong to put it back."
At the hospital, those doctors couldn't get a hold of the x-rays and MRIs from the first injury.
"What we ended up having to do when we were in the emergency care area is the sort of patched him up and we went back to our first doctor," said Hack.
Rob Hack isn't just an ordinary parent with a kid in the emergency room, he's the director of HealtheConnections, a new Regional Health Information Organization. They're creating hub for medical records so doctors can share them electronically.
Hack Says Community General Hospital in Syracuse is the first to sign on to the exchange.
"They're technically live. Information is traveling back and forth between Community General Hospital and the exchange. But right now, no one is sharing that information because we haven't started the patient consent process," said Hack.
Consent is important, because health insurance companies and hospitals are already collecting the data. Unless that patient gives consent to share it, that information is trapped in a database. Hack says other places are further along in that consent process.
"Rochester for example, who has been doing this a lot longer than we have, is signing up 30,000 patient consents per month," said Hack.
But patient consent isn't what's holding electronic medical record sharing back.
Rachel Block, Deputy Commissioner of the NY Office of Health Information Technology Transformation, says the business side of health care to agree on a single system is a long process.
"Looking across the different ancillary providers, the pharmacies, the labs, all that. It's pretty complicated stuff pulling all that together from the business side. The technical aspect actually isn't that difficult. It is the governance and the business arrangements," said Block.
Some of the business arrangements are already set. Health Insurance Providers such as Excellus, MVP, Aetna, POMCO, and EBS-RMSCO have already signed on to share data.
The only notable health provider that hasn't signed on is United Health Care, though backers hope to get them onboard too.
But it takes a lot of money to set up one of these arrangements. HealtheConnections has received $3.5 Million through public-private partnerships. Syracuse area Congressman Dan Maffei helped bring in $ 900,000 worth of federal money. The Democrat says you can share lots of things online, you should be able to share medical records.
"You can find somebody's financial stuff, you can find a photo of them. You can maybe get on their Facebook page. But, none the less physicians (given the permission of the patient) can't get information about their patients because of the lack of that infrastructure," said Maffei
Supporters say the goal is to eventually have people able access their own health care records from home, so they can have more direct control over their medical care.