In a long term effort to save on medical care costs by increasing patient care efficiency, The Arizona State University Dept. of Bio-Medical Informatics (BMI) is currently in collaboration with Arizona Health-e Connection (AzHeC) is a project that is designed to facilitate the adoption of an electronic medical records system. To this end, ASU has received a grant amounting to $1.5 million with an additional sub-award going to AzHeC in the amount of $10.8 million. This was provided by the Office of the National Coordinator through funds awarded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This project award is currently set to run through summer of 2012 with a likely extension to be given up till 2014.

It’s been noted that the portion of the project provided by ASU will include the creation of educational materials along with intern training for the proposed workforce. Additionally, ASU will provide educational events along with advanced practices demonstrations that illustrate the vast potential of this aspect of technology dealing with health information storage and dissemination. These project aspects were stated by the director of BMI, Robert Greenes. This collaboration is expected to greatly facilitate the ability of various healthcare providers to share patient information and even provide patients with a way to access their own medical histories and test results.

Greenes also added that the fundamental means of improving the health care in the United States, overall, is the standardization of electronic health records. The way to begin this is to start with current expansion projects that would bring EMR to hospitals and clinic facilities, especially those in outlying areas that have experienced communication delays in the past. Besides speeding up the communication process, EMR technology can also assist in the reduction of medical errors while improving the overall efficiency of the health care process for the entire U.S.

However, it’s an unfortunate fact that almost 75% of physicians in Arizona don’t have access to EMR technology. In light of this deficiency, AzHeC and BMI are working hard to utilize their grants in order to effectively spread the technology that will improve medical care access in the state of Arizona. The ultimate goal is to have the entire nation connected to EMR technology by the year 2014. In light of this, the HITECH Act has been instituted as a consumer protection, once medical records have been converted over to an electronic medium. Security will be maintained through extensive monitoring.