PORTLAND (AP) – A project now in its infancy is seen as a way to improve health care in Maine by providing up-to-date patient information to clinicians.

The Maine Health Information Network Technology project would enable authorized doctors to gain access to medical test results, prescriptions and other potentially vital information that might otherwise slip through the cracks.

Beneficiaries might include older or sicker patients with multiple doctors. The system could prove critical when someone is rushed to an emergency room and the doctor doesn’t have time to ask for a fax of medical records.

When the system is up and running, patients would be able to see their own medical records and work with their physicians to correct any inaccuracies or omissions, such as mention of an allergy.

“This holds tremendous promise for improving patient safety and quality of care,” said James Harnar, executive director of the Maine Health Information Center, the nonprofit health data organization that is directing the project.

Harnar said the system would moderate the growth of health-care costs by avoiding duplicative tests and hospitalizations resulting from medical errors.

Plans call for the project to get its first trial runs in early 2007 and go statewide by 2010. Funding remains a question mark, however, and there are also concerns about patient privacy.

The program is still “many millions of dollars” away from implementation, Harnar said.

The $380,000 that has been raised so far, for things such as a feasibility study, has come from his organization, the Maine Health Access Foundation and two state agencies, the Maine Bureau of Health and the Maine Quality Forum.

“At this stage, we don’t know where the rest of the funding is going to come from, though we are examining a lot of different sources,” Harnar said.

The state’s larger hospital systems already have adopted the technology, so data from doctors’ practices and laboratories in the system are easily accessible to one another. The new system would go beyond that by weaving medical records together for patients who go to different hospital networks or get checkups at one practice but go somewhere else for major procedures.

“I expect, for at least a decade, it’s not going to be the sole source of information about patients,” said Dr. Roderick Prior, who leads the project’s physician advisory committee and is the medical director at Franklin Memorial Hospital in Farmington.

“But 10, 20 years from now, it could be so good that it becomes the place where people get information and are so confident they won’t have to look elsewhere,” Prior said.

Information from: Portland Press Herald, http://www.pressherald.com

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