ATLANTA – A new retail medical clinic has opened in Atlanta, although you won’t find it in a drugstore or at a Wal-Mart. And this clinic has been digital from day one.
The AeroClinic, a walk-in medical facility located in the main terminal of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, serves travelers moving through one of the most heavily trafficked airports in the United States.
More than 80 million passengers pass through the Atlanta airport in a year, and the clinic’s leadership hopes to use healthcare information technology to attract some of their business.
“We wanted to be high-tech from the very beginning,” said Pete Mounts, AeroClinic’s CIO. “Technology was especially critical for us given the mobility of patients who are visiting an airport clinic. Airline passengers want to get in and out of a medical clinic very quickly, so we needed IT that provided highly efficient clinical and practice management functionality.”
Patients check into AeroClinic using on-site electronic kiosks. Each patient enters his or her personal data, medical history, and payment information.
“We wanted information from a patient’s medical history to flow easily into the electronic health record and practice management system,” said Dominick Mack, MD, chief medical officer at AeroClinic.
Mack explained that Aero-Clinic employs completely paperless recordkeeping, using an EHR and practice management system and an online patient portal that gives patients access to information from their medical exam days or even hours, after their travels have ended.
“Business travelers can use the portal to check lab results, communicate with AeroClinic, or to provide information to their primary care physician at home,” Mack said.
Patients can give their primary care providers access to their secure AeroClinic records via the patient portal, he added.
AeroClinic’s EHR/PM system populates a personal health record that patients can maintain online via the portal.
While patients can continue to use the PHR online, Mack said that he eventually wants to provide travelers with their personal health records on thumb drives as they leave AeroClinic.
Atlanta-based McKesson Healthcare provided all the technology for AeroClinic.
“We wanted to go with a single vendor solution,” Mounts said. “And as McKesson is in Atlanta, it worked out well.”
In addition to treating travelers, AeroClinic sees a potential market in the 55,000 airport employees in Atlanta.
“We’re priced to be affordable, and we can be a convenient option for people who work in the airport,” Mack said. “We’re not trying to replace primary care physicians, but for airport workers who are uninsured or underinsured, AeroClinic is an inexpensive option.”
AeroClinic plans to expand to the top 20 U.S. airports over the next five years, starting with a new clinic in the Philadelphia International Airport in late summer 2007.
