Fresh Healthy Body

A grant for nearly $1.37 million will allow Coastal Family Health to expand its electronic warehouse, adding four more centers to a shared database.

Seven federally qualified medical offices are part of the state’s Health Center Controlled Network, a group of health centers that has banded together to exchange information.

The grant is one of 18 totalling $27.8 million awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services to implement electronic health records and other health information technology innovations.

The money is part of $2 billion allotted to the department’s Health Resources and Services Administration under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

The money is to be used to expand health-care services to low-income and uninsured people through its health-center program.

“Broad use of health information technology has the potential to improve health- care quality, prevent medical errors and increase the efficiency of care provision,” said David Blumenthal, national coordinator for Health Information Technology.

“This program supports the department’s overall efforts to assist physicians and hospitals in adopting and becoming meaningful users of health information technology.”

The Health Center Controlled Network has established ways to meet administrative, information technology and clinical quality objectives, said Chuck Clark, the network’s chief information officer and IT director for Coastal Family Health.

Coastal Family Health, with its nine offices Coastwide plus four mobile units, will share a medical database with 10 other centers around the state, Clark said.

This sharing allows Coastal Family Health patients access to their medical records at any of the other offices in the Mississippi Primary Health Care Association that are in the network, which is especially beneficial following a weather-related evacuation.

“It makes their records more portable,” he said.

The network includes two data centers, a primary center in Hattiesburg and a secondary center in Birmingham.

“If something happens to the primary, the secondary is up and running,” Clark said.

The upgrades and additions should be complete next summer.

This is the second technology grant Coastal has received to expand the health network in the state, said Chief Financial Officer Katherine Hill. A grant received several years ago paid for the database for the initial seven health centers, she said.

Coastal Family Health, a 501c nonprofit, provides health care and social services to all persons regardless of economic status. Almost 31,000 patients used the center last year, Clark said.