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HOME > ABOUT > PRESS > COUNTY'S SMALL HEALTH CLINICS GETTING ALL WIRED UP
Article published - April 8, 2008
Credit: SONOMA WEST TIMES
County’s small health clinics getting all wired up
by David Abbott
Guerneville — A new electronic records system was the topic of a recent presentation given by Dr. Jason Cunningham of West County Health Centers (WCHC) — who in collaboration with the Redwood Community Health Coalition (RCHC) — is working to get it implemented into three Sonoma County community health clinics by June.
The presentation outlined the role electronic health records (EHR) will play in the future of health care in the county and the RCHC clinics.
The cost of the eClinicalWorks  system is $12 million, which will be split between 13 clinics throughout Sonoma, Marin, Napa and Yolo Counties, and according to Cunningham $6 million has already been raised through grants.
Each individual clinic will have to pay about $600,000, which includes $90,000 for licensing fees and technical support, $5,000 for clinic renoations, $140,000 for “end-user hardware” — computers, and other IT items — $75,000 for staff training and development, and about $205,000 in “productivity loss.”
ON-LINE ?? Dr. Jason Cunningham demonstrates the patient-friendly benefits of the new electronic information system to Care Team Representative Yeni Manzanares at the site of the new Sebastopol Community Health Clinic. - Photo by David Abbott
The system has been installed in a fledgling facility in Sebastopol in order to begin the process, but WCHC plans to have all of the clinics “wired up” by June.
Although the EHS is being touted by the other Sonoma County clinics, Alliance Health in Healdsburg has chosen not to join in. Citing prohibitive costs, and an inability to recover from productivity losses incurred getting the system off the ground, Alliance CEO Jack Neureuter thought the timing wasn’t right for Alliance.
“The main issue is money,” he said. “It’s a significant investment to get into the program, and whatever the initial investment is, we’d have to double that for training and hardware.”
Neureuter also sees production loss affecting the quality of patient care at a facility that’s already facing tough times due to the state budget woes and unfunded federal mandates.
The RCHC is pooling resources in order to integrate modern patient records technology with a “medical home” approach to health care. Medical home is patient-oriented, and seeks to include the patient in all aspects of health care from preventative health care to oversight of the patient’s own medical records.
“Primary care should be safe and equitable medical care,” Cunningham said. “The effective use of electronic health care is a stepping-stone to do something great for health care.”
The process began more than four years ago when RCHC leaders discussed the feasibility of an electronic records system. The group hired consultants to study different products on the market. According to Mary Szecsey, Executive Director of WCHC the eClinicalWorks software was chosen because of affordability and features such as eHealth eXchange, which allows the system to communicate with different providers.
“There are a lot of different issues involved, including population management and data collection,” Szecsy said. “It was a business decision and not just about the quality of care.”
The software gives the clinics the ability to control records and produce reports and documents required by various government agencies, as well as tracking health trends in order to enhance system wide preventative health care.
It also offers the ability to print out a summary of treatment in clinics on the spot to go over with patients to ensure the information is correct, and allows patients to be more involved in the process.
“This represents a seismic shift and transformation in our efficiency as a business operation,” she said. “It gives us a lot more flexibility and reliability.”
The clinics serve rural, agricultural, suburban and urban communities in the North Bay, an area with a total population of approximately one million people. According to the RCHC Web site, nearly 10 percent of the total population lives beneath the federal poverty level and 24 percent lives beneath 200 percent of the poverty level.
Additionally, the two most significant ethnic groups are white non-Hispanic — 68 percent of the population — and Hispanics (24 percent), which is the fastest growing segment of the population. Fourteen percent of the total population has no insurance and 11 percent use Medi-Cal or Healthy Families (SCHIP).
The WCHC treated 36,000 visits, by 8177 patients in 2007. Of those, 2,000 had Medicaid and 3,000 were uninsured.
There are two more presentations scheduled in the month of April. The next one will be held at 5 p.m., April 17, in the Bocci Ballroom at Occidental’s Union Hotel, and the final presentation will be held at 5p.m. on April 23, at the Guerneville Public Library.
The Russian River Health Center in Guerneville is scheduled to “go-live” in May, and the Occidental Area Health Center will “go-live” in June. All of the other RCHC community health centers will “go-live” over the next two years.
“We feel the way we’re doing it is the way of the future,” Cunningham said. “We’re trying to transform the health care system.”
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