Smart Card Talk

September 2006 • Volume 11 Number 9

Feature of the Month

Multi-site Hospital System Impliments Smart Card for Patient Management

Throughout the United States, healthcare organizations are now investigating and deploying new information technology that is designed not only to solve the significant challenges that the industry is facing, but that also provide new functionality that improves patient care and the efficiency of healthcare delivery. Smart card technology is being incorporated into many of these new healthcare systems as an instrumental component that protects and enables convenient access to patient data and that supports new applications that deliver both clinical and administrative benefits.

This month's Smart Card Talk article, written by Frank Avignone, Healthmeans, and Shannon Calhoun, Executive Director of the Southeast Texas Hospital System, provides a profile of the smart card project being implemented by the Southeast Texas Hospital System.

Southeast Texas Hospital System (STHS) is an organization consisting of 8 hospitals with associated referring physicians, clinics and other rural health facilities that is committed to improving patient access, quality of care and cost efficiencies among the healthcare providers in the middle Gulf Coast region of Texas. They have formed a regional health information organization (RHIO) of south Texas rural hospital members that are all using HealthMeans smart cards and smart card ready applications coupled with community network services for their patients as portable health records. The program, entitled MiRHIO, currently has 7 hospital members and 200 participating physicians with plans to distribute 40,000 smart cards to patients in rural south Texas. MiRHIO participating healthcare facilities will use the HealthMeans smart cards to capture information at each hospital facility to assist with expediting registration and providing better patient care; however, the larger scope of the project is to be able to share pertinent data among rural facilities.

STHS was the recipient of a grant for Gulf Bend Access Partners for the purpose of the design, network development and preparation of a federal Healthy Communities Access Program. The grant included deployment of smart cards for named rural health facilities in the south Texas region. STHS is using the smart card project as the primary means of capturing and transporting patient healthcare data between their participating healthcare provider members within the MiRHIO network. Each facility issues smart cards to their patients. The smart cards contain a complete health data summary with current information regarding medicines, allergies, treatment history, insurance data, demographics, family history, physicians orders, referrals and other pertinent information that was previously transported via paper and fax process.

The project’s ultimate purpose is to improve health care access and outcomes for the uninsured and underinsured. Goals include using three mutually-supportive strategies to: (1) Improve access to primary and specialty medical care, and behavioral health services, for uninsured/underinsured Gulf Bend residents; (2) Improve health care outcomes for uninsured/underinsured Gulf Bend residents who suffer from chronic diseases via case management based on regionally-accepted protocols; and (3) Employ health information technology (HIT) to improve safety-net provider operating efficiencies and service quality, enabling these providers to expand access to care for uninsured/underinsured Gulf Bend residents. For each goal, objectives have been identified in order to measure the extent to which the goal is achieved by project activities.

STHS ultimately plans to use the miRHIO program to share common data among healthcare providers in order to have more accurate information and patient history, as well as to track outcomes and utilization from the data collected. This will enable STHS to provide a higher quality of care as the information pertains to chronic disease management, mental health and the uninsured. The miRHIO smart card program allows each card-carrying patient to be able to expedite their check-in process, starting at a self-serve kiosk and using the miRHIO card to pre-populate information they might typically have to recall from memory and complete on paper.

Shannon Calhoun will be presenting more information about the STHS program at the Alliance Annual Conference, Oct. 3-5, at the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla, California.