PHOENIX – The Purchasing & Assistance Collaborative for Electronic Health Records is partnering with two health IT vendors in an effort to provide Arizona's physician practices with affordable electronic health records.

PACeHR officials said the partnership with Austin, Texas-based e-MDs, and Cleveland-based Noteworthy Medical Systems is expected to help drive the adoption of EHRs in small to medium-sized physician practices and help them maximize on federal funds provided by the stimulus package.

"The PACeHR program to stimulate physician EMR adoption is an important investment in improving healthcare quality and containing costs," said Wes Rishel, a healthcare analyst with Gartner. "You can't manage what you can't measure, and it is impractical to measure data that is locked up in paper charts."

According to a survey conducted by the Phoenix-based Health Services Advisory Group, approximately 95 percent of all primary care is delivered in practices that employ less than five physicians and almost all primary care is delivered in practices that employ 10 or fewer physicians. The survey estimates that only 4 percent to 9 percent of the 7,000  practices in Arizona have some form of HIT.

As a way to tackle this problem, Arizona formed the PACeHR as a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of EHRs in physician practices.

Noteworthy Medical Systems and e-MDs were selected by a panel of 16 clinicians, a Gartner analyst and legal and business experts, according to Anita Murcko, project director for PACeHR. The panel evaluated 14 vendors during a six-month process.

“Physicians will be much more confident in their EHR purchases knowing that the PACeHR selection panel included clinicians who evaluated the EHR solutions based on a host of criteria including scalability, interoperability and long-term use,” said panel member Anil Goud, MD, an internist and hospitalist at a 14-doctor internal medicine group in Phoenix. “Many smaller practices have not yet digitized because of cost, fear of buying the wrong system and concern that vendors will ignore their needs once the contract is signed.”

Through this collaboration, all licensed care providers are eligible to subscribe to Web-based EHRs and practice management solutions from e-MDs and Noteworthy Medical Systems. PACeHR officials said early adopters who subscribe before July 1, 2010 will receive expanded support and assistance from the group to help maximize available funds released by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

“When you are a small practice, you are at the mercy of the vendor as to the timing of implementation, upgrades, support and their willingness to listen to technology enhancement requests," said Goud. "As a large purchasing group, PACeHR ensures that small and medium-sized physician practices will have equal access to vendors and receive excellent service. Additionally, the collaborative organization provides the opportunity for groups using the same technology to share and promote best practices to improve quality of care, patient safety and administrative efficiencies.”

“In addition to targeting primary care practices, we are also reaching out to community clinics and long-term care, behavioral health and correctional facilities serving the uninsured and other special populations,” said Roger A. Hughes, PACeHR’s board president and executive director of St. Luke's Health Initiatives, a public foundation in Phoenix. “Every physician practice and care provider organization is unique."

Since the collaboration, 10 Arizona practices have begun implementing Web-based EHR solutions and two more  are expected to go live by the end of 2009.