BOSTON – Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC),a Harvard teaching hospital based in Boston, is connecting four diverse, local physician offices to its community electronic health record and anticipates data sharing among the small offices by August.

Through the program, 300 doctors in 150 practices in the New England region will have the capability to share protected health information by 2010 and within five years all clinicians will be on EHRs, said John Halamka, MD, CIO of BIDMC and of Harvard Medical Center.

The broad program is BIDMC's answer to enabling all physicians in the community to deliver continuity of care through the use of an EHR system, said Halamka, who is also CEO of MA-SHARE, chair of the U.S. Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel and a practicing emergency physician.

BIDMC's own electronic medical record system, which manages 3 million patient records, delivers seamless integration of hospital data to the private physician office, he said.

The next step is enabling data sharing among physicians' offices. "This is a policy issue, not a technology issue," Halamka said, and one that BIDMC is still working through.

BIDMC has worked with its numerous partners - healthcare services firm Concordant, EHR software vendor eClinicalWorks, security solutions provider Third Brigade - to build its world-class, yet economical infrastructure, said Halamka. The Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative has provided the training and practice transformation from paper to electronic.