Massachusetts Flips The Switch On $50 Million Health IT TestMassachusetts Flips The Switch On $50 Million Health IT Test

Massachusetts on Friday kicked off the formal launch of three large-scale regional health IT pilots involving hospitals, physician practices, nursing homes, and other care facilities in three large communities.

The projects aim to examine the effectiveness and practicality of widely implementing electronic health records in community-practice settings and could serve as the model for statewide, or perhaps even nationwide, adoption of digitized medical-record systems. "This will go down as a great day in Massachusetts," said the state's Gov. Mitt Romney, one of several local, state and federal government dignitaries on hand at the launch's press conference at Good Samaritan Hospital in Brockton, Mass. -- a city in southeastern Massachusetts that's one of the three communities conducting the pilots. The other two communities are Newburyport, a seaport district on the north shore of the state; and northern Berkshire, a region in western Massachusetts.

While the three communities will individually deploy the systems -- the three regions won't be wired together during the pilots -- the aim is to create an environment that could connect them, and other regional efforts, in the future so that patient records can be electronically shared statewide. Collectively, the initiative involves the rollout of digital medical records and decision-support systems for 600 physicians who care for more than half a million people in 200 sites.

The projects are being led by the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, a nonprofit coalition launched last year by 34 health-care providers, health plans, and insurers in the state, which picked the three communities in March from more than 35 that had applied to participate in the two- to three-year study. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, a member of the collaborative, provided $50 million in seed funding to back the pilots. A statewide deployment of interoperable electronic-health-records systems would cost about $1 billion, according to the collaborative.

A goal of the projects is to demonstrate that digitizing and electronically sharing patient records, lab reports, pharmacy, and other data, leads to better medical decisions, fewer errors, and lower costs. Romney says he "wasn't sure if we'll see cost savings initially," during the early phases of the pilots, but he was confident that the program would improve patient care, as well as improve the sharing of clinical data for research, perhaps resulting in faster medical discoveries.

Romney says his experience with companies that he's been involved with over the years makes him aware that it can take a while for IT implementations to show savings, but that "productivity improvements are so dramatic" earlier on.

Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), who also spoke at the event, says government research has found that for every health-care dollar spent, 33 cents is spent on "nonclinical" activities such as administrative costs. A goal for the nation is to reduce nonclinical costs to about 26 cents for every health-care dollar spent. Those savings would total about $150 billion annually. IT is the key in achieving those savings, he says. Government data shows that half of the nation's medical claims are filed electronically, costing a few cents per claim, while the other half are still filed via paper forms, costing about $22 per claim.

Dr. David Brailer, who was appointed by President Bush last year as the country's first National Health IT Coordinator, said at the event that the Massachusetts pilots are the type of regional health information organizations, or RHIOs, that the federal government wants to see develop nationally. Regional efforts are powerful because they put "the patient in the center," Brailer said. RHIOs can provide physicians and other clinicians with "the whole picture of a person" by making available electronically health information about a patient from many different sources, whether it's lab test results, pharmacy records, or hospital data. Health IT also gives patients "control of their information and portability of it," he said.

"It's not rocket science," he said. "It's happening in other parts of our lives."

Kennedy ironically noted that while Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is spending $50 million on these three community pilots in just one state, the federal government is mulling over whether to earmark a total of $50 million to fund health-IT projects in several states.

Earlier this week, in an effort to help kick-start nationwide adoption of health IT, a bi-partisan bill was introduced into Congress proposing that the federal government provide grants totaling $50 million to about 20 RHIOs. Sponsors of the 21st Century Health Information Act of 2005 (H.R. 2234), which proposes the federal funding, are Reps. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., who is Sen. Kennedy's son -- and Tim Murphy, R-Pa. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., who spoke at the public unveiling of the act on Wednesday, plans to introduce a Senate version of the bill, a spokeswoman for Rep. Kennedy says.

Also earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a new report that includes recommendations from a panel of nine CEOs of large corporations for "urgent" adoption of IT by the health-care industry to help reduce soaring health-care costs and improve patient quality of care.