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GCN Home > 09/22/05 web stories

KatrinaHealth.org to provide evacuees' electronic drug data

By Mary Mosquera, GCN Staff

A public-private ad hoc group has launched a secure online service for authorized health professionals to gain electronic access to prescription medication records for Hurricane Katrina evacuees.

KatrinaHealth.org will give a single point of access to authorized health professionals and pharmacies to the Hurricane Relief Prescription Network, which contains evacuees’ medication and dosage information in order to renew prescriptions, prescribe new medications and coordinate care. This information will be accessible to physicians treating evacuees from anywhere in the country.

David Brailer, the national coordinator for health IT in the Health and Human Services Department, brought together the effort to create KatrinaHealth.org and make it available quickly to health care professionals. Within two weeks, physicians in shelters began testing the system.

A broad group of private companies, public agencies and national organizations compiled and made accessible the medical data through the Web site. The group includes medical software companies, pharmacy benefits managers and pharmacy chains, as well as local, state and federal agencies and a national foundation.

“We focused on [prescription data] because it was low-hanging fruit with very high value in a short-term emergency. It was not intended to be a long-term project or mechanism that would go forward, unless an after-action analysis concludes that we have something valuable here,” Brailer told reporters in a teleconference. “But it indicates what we can do when we cut past the barriers to focus on results,” he said.

The Web site is a portal to a network of database holders. It harmonizes the way data is accessed through the front end provided by Medicaid contractor Gold Standard Multimedia of Tampa, Fla., which allows for a common and tight level of security for physician user authentication and strict criteria to search for a patient, he said. A physician cannot search for any given person with a specific last name in the database, but instead must know specific facts about the patient.

“This syndication is very much in the spirit of interoperability and of providing portable, seamless data,” Brailer said. The database does not live in a single space. “A lot of workarounds were probably used to put this together quickly instead of a long-term architecture, but it is consistent with principles we’ve laid out and applicable to all the laws,” he said.

More news on related topics: Health IT, Management, Web Strategies



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