SAN DIEGO – The Owen Clinic, located at the University of California in San Diego, is using a new customizable electronic medical record to meet the specific needs of its HIV patients.

The clinic is using Lab Tracker HIV, offered by Virco Lab, Inc., and GroundZero Software, to exchange data between its healthcare providers.

“There are medical and social challenges, and funding challenges when treating patients with HIV,” said Chris Mathews, director at the Owen Clinic. “In our clinic, of the 2,500 HIV patients, only 800 are federally funded.”
Mathews said the new software provides interoperability that is helping to boost the care the clinic provides to its patients.

"A customized EMR is of paramount importance in HIV care, in which successful treatment decisions and practice management rely on clinical history tracking, comprehensive reporting and data analysis,” said Karam Mounzer, medical director of Jonathan Lax Center/Philadelphia FIGHT, a comprehensive AIDS service organization.

“Lab Tracker has a number of reporting features for organizing a patient’s medical history,” said Mathews. “What medication the patient is taking, when the patient started, any interruptions, and major diagnoses. All of those reporting measures are tailored to the needs of our HIV patients.”

Treating HIV is a very specific process, said Mathews, and the patient needs to be involved in that process.

“We developed the patient self-management model,” said Mathews. “Lab Tracker prints out for each patient the medications and any diagnoses in order to involve the patient in the care process and to ensure accuracy with medications. This enables patients and physicians to update medical information, so by the next visit, physicians can have up-to-date medical information at the point of care.”

Scott Rairigh, U.S. vice president of  Bridgewater, N.J. – based Virco Lab, Inc. said offering this IT solution was a way for the company to help physicians treat HIV and broaden it’s healthcare technology offerings.

“Our business is understanding the HIV virus, and finding cost effective ways for physicians to understand it,” said Rairigh. “We collectively worked together to meet this medical need and, through understanding data, we were ultimately led to making a tailored HIV practice EMR.”

As an academic provider, Matthews said the clinic has had to train its students on using the new system.

“We focus on functions that the students will be using directly, entering counseling documentation, etc.,” said Mathews. “It is fairly easy to orient, but I would like to see an improvement in documentation storage.”
Officials at Owens Clinic in the future expect to expand the capabilities offered through Lab Tracker to include templates that are specific to other serious diseases.

“I’ve mentioned to the Virco people to develop functions that combine Hepititus C and HIV because many of our patients have both conditions,” said Mathews. “ I would also like to see more comprehensive substance abuse screening and more qualitative measures to record things like depression.”