WASHINGTON – It didn't take long for the Washington buzz about information technology to spur Stephen Badger to action.

Badger is chief executive officer of George Washington University's Medical Faculty Associates. The multispecialty medical practice of 275 teaching physicians today stands as a national model of what can be accomplished with IT. The nation's healthcare IT czar was slated to visit the practice on Nov. 17 to put the spotlight on the group's achievements.

The practice, in a seven-story building at 2150 Pennsylvania Ave., just eight blocks from the White House, is well known in Washington circles, having treated Vice President Richard Cheney and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.

As Congress prepares to take action on a number of healthcare IT bills, it is what the medical practice has done with IT that is capturing its attention. GW Medical Faculty Associates set a goal of rolling out an EMR system to 100 physicians in 30 days. It took 28 days.

"This is going to transform our practice," Badger said. In March the practice deployed TouchWorks technology developed by Chicago-based Allscripts to 35 physicians in general internal medicine. The rollout went smoothly. "And we were just plodding along," Badger said.

But it wasn't enough. "We wanted to go through an aggressive rollout," he said, "to really put on a full-court press."

In May, Badger and his team started to plan for a 30-day deployment of TouchWorks to 100 physicians in a variety of specialties, such as cardiology, rheumatology, endocrinology, obstetrics and gynecology.

They completed the switch on July 5, two days ahead of schedule.

"Physicians love it right now," Badger said. "Everyone else wants to go up."

And, they will – by the end of the fiscal year in June.

The most difficult technological challenge was connecting numerous separate clinical information systems to the EMR workstation in real time, said Praveen Toteja, chief information officer for the practice.

"This was challenging, especially as some of these existing systems needed to be updated before any data could feed into the EMR," Toteja said.

Ryan Bosch, MD, director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at GW Medical Faculty Associates, served as director of the TouchWorks initiative for the practice.

The single greatest benefit from the TouchWorks rollout, he said, is the complete integration of all clinical information to include labs, exams, special procedures, X-rays, and physician notes all in one place.

A patient's medical history is available to all members of the healthcare team, in a structured way, anytime and from various remote sites - even for concurrent users.

"The old paper chart could never to that," Bosch said.

Washington and all the healthcare organizations and leaders have been looking for a place to point to – a sort of showcase for what an electronic medical record system can achieve in a group practice. Now, they have one, said Glen Tullman, chief executive officer of Allscripts.

The idea is to drive the country from conversation to action, Tullman said.Tullman said Allscripts has rolled out TouchWorks in 100 organizations, representing

1,000 clinics across the country.

What makes GW unique, he said, is location, the fact that it are using the entire medical record system with all its latest tools and also the fact that it was rolled out so quickly. Previously, a typical installation took between three to six months.

To hear Bosch tell of it, putting the project on the fast track made it all the more exciting.

"No glitches or aggravations," he said, "just the constant excitement to automate archaic medical practice patterns and the constant work to define the workflows involved and then align them with the efficiencies of the EMR technology.

"TouchWorks is an excellent EMR, but without utilization, it becomes unused technology," he added.

Tullman agrees. "This is no longer about the software and the technology," he said. "It's about leadership."