WASHINGTON – Whether the recently named Beacon Communities are nearby or a few states away, as Jonathan Teich, MD, sees it, they are likely to inform healthcare providers across the country.

On May 4, the government released the names of the 15 communities from Maine to Hawaii that will serve as models for the broad use of healthcare information technology under a $220 million program aimed at improving care and efficiency – and creating new jobs.

"We need good examples," said Teich, who works as chief medical informatics officer for Elsevier, is assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an attending physician in emergency medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

"We can read all about how to do it, and we can read books and guidance, but I think that providers really want to see examples of how it’s working somewhere else, someplace like them.

"This is a pretty good way to not only fund these organizations, and to help encourage them to go in a direction that is broadly applicable and interoperable, but I think it’s also a way of making sure that what these 15 places do can easily be seen and accessed by other providers."

"These pioneering communities are going to lead the way in bringing smarter, lower-cost health care to all Americans through use of electronic health records," said Vice President Joseph Biden, in announcing the awards. "Because of their early efforts, doctors across the country will one day be able to coordinate patient care with the stroke of a key or pull up life-saving health information instantly in an emergency – and for the residents of these communities, that future is about to become a reality. 

The selected Beacon Communities will use health IT resources within their community as a foundation for bringing doctors, hospitals, community health programs, federal programs and patients together to design new ways of improving quality and efficiency to benefit patients and taxpayers. 

Each Beacon Community has elected specific and measurable improvement goals in each of three vital areas for health systems improvement: quality, cost-efficiency and population health.  The goals vary according to the needs and priorities of each community.

IT resources within the community

The selected Beacon Communities will use health IT resources within their community as a foundation for bringing doctors, hospitals, community health programs, federal programs and patients together to design new ways of improving quality and efficiency to benefit patients and taxpayers.  They have selected specific and measurable improvement goals in each of three vital areas for health systems improvement: quality, cost-efficiency, and population health. 

To Carol Reynolds, MD, medical director of Potomac Physicians, a seven-office medical group in the Baltimore-Washington, metropolitan area, the prospect is exciting – though there are no Beacon Communities in her region.
"When you are looking at coordination of health information, that I must admit is almost magical to me – how we truly can have access to information and manage all that information at the point of care.

"To really know at the point of care when this patient was admitted to the hospital, but then also know when that patient saw a specialist outside of your requirement to refer them, so there’s information that needs to come back, how to get all of that back to you and in you system and populated the correct way so that you really always know what’s going on with the patient even though you are looking at a different 25 patients today – that’s enormous."
Michael Nissenbaum, CEO of Aprima, a vendor of electronic health record systems, applauds the fact that several beacon communities will be working on various chronic disease projects.

"At least were going after a defined target," Nissenbaum said. "EHR measurement is also critical. We may be able to start getting our arms around some of these major disease – epidemics – that have infiltrated our population. And when you start getting your arms around it proactively, you start to reduce the overall cost – not just to the patient and the medical center, but to society as whole.

"If you can control hypertension in a population, if you can control childhood asthma, and take the cost out of that disease or reduce it, both the real and the secondary cost – the parents missing work…it’s going to be very quantifiable. And, for the first time, we’re going to have a great ROI in our healthcare system."