The Regional Health Records for Nebraska’s Panhandle project is the collaborative work of Rural Healthcare Cooperative Network, Panhandle Partnership for Health and Human Services, Panhandle Public Health District, and the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center. This one-year project will produce a viable and sustainable plan for the implementation of a regional health record system within established networks of rural hospitals, clinics, public health providers, behavioral health providers, and others across a 14,000 square mile remote area. Regional health records will ultimately enable partners to improve patient safety and quality of care within the critical access hospital network and extending to other community health and human service providers.

This project will contribute substantially to achieving an improved, sustainable system of collaborative healthcare that respects the autonomy of hospitals and creates a compatible, shared, unified paperless system that has the capability to seamlessly share patient information among hospitals and providers in real time, and that ties into national standards for integration into national networks.

This project will produce a regional health record sharing plan with the following aims:

1. Delineate a standards-based, coherent, scalable and achievable technology solution

2. Articulate the value proposition for individual organizational partners, the critical access network and the regional community

3. Include all hospitals within a regional critical access health network and extend to all health clinic and behavioral health providers

4. Include participation from all levels of leadership from participating partners

5. Work within existing collaborative and information channels to ensure scalability and extensibility to other key health care providers, such as bioterrorism, public health and other safety net providers

The plan, completed by September 30, 2005, will model a solution applicable to small hospitals across the nation because the plan will accommodate the wide variability in technological capacity and readiness represented by the partnering organizations.

This project is funded by a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality awarded to ChadronCommunityHospital in the amount of $198,772 (Transforming Healthcare Quality Through Information Technology – Planning Grant # RFA-HS-04-01 For more information contact:

Joan Frances,  Executive Director, Rural Healthcare Cooperative Network 601 High School Street Kimball NE 69145 308-235-4211 pphhsvision@earthlink.net