OCEAN SPRING, MS –

It took a leap of faith for nurse practitioner Kathleen Cecilia Arnold to open a diabetes clinic in Ocean Spring, Miss., less than three months after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

That leap paid off, and she attributes the clinic’s success to being an early adopter of technology. The use of technology also helped earn the Diabetes Center, PLLC, the HIMSS Davies Award in the ambulatory care category.

“My story is an example of building an EHR clinic from the ground up in three weeks or less, without a lot of cash,” said Arnold.

Arnold said her EHR, from Austin, Texas-based e-MDs, is self-funded and has been live since the day the clinic opened. She said her clinic could be a model for others, and demonstrates that an EHR “doesn’t need to break the bank.”

“Within one year of implementing our EHR, I was out of the red,” she said.

Arnold said she and her staff attend the e-MDs user conference every year to keep up to date on the technology. This year they are attending the annual HIMSS11 Conference and Exhibition for the first time.

“The annual e-MDs User Conference and Symposium has given hundreds of customers the ability to attend sessions with numerous different areas of focus,” said Patrick Hall, |executive vice president of business development, for e-MDs. “From basic training to advanced workflow and clinical transformation, practices are put in a position to optimize the use of their systems. The user meetings are also a great opportunity to meet with other customers and collaborate on strategies they have found to be effective. These have been so successful at bolstering the community spirit that e-MDs has branched out to deliver smaller, regional events.”

Arnold owns the clinic – a first for a HIMSS Davies winner and something that isn’t very common. She’s part of a small but growing number of nurse practitioner-owned clinics, measuring about 1 percent to 2 percent of the nation’s clinics. Her staff consists of one nurse, receptionist, biller and medical assistant.

Becoming an approved provider for the insurance companies was more difficult than Arnold had expected. “I was fortunate to have a specialty that is so needed in our community,” she said.  “That is how I finally got around it.”

Unfortunately, Arnold said, a nurse practitioner doesn’t qualify under the Medicare provisions for meeting meaningful use, and her clinic sees less than the 30 percent of Medicaid patients required to receive incentives.

Jim Tate, founder of EMRAdvocate and a nationally recognized expert on the American Rehabilitation and Recovery Act and its HITECH provisions, said thinking that nurse practitioners are eligible for both the Medicare and Medicaid ARRA incentives is a myth – one of six that are common concerning the programs. A Medicare EP is defined as “a doctor of medicine or osteopathy, a doctor of dental surgery or dental medicine, a doctor of podiatric medicine, a doctor of optometry, or a chiropractor.”

Arnold said if something changed she would be “ready to proceed (on meaningful use) tomorrow.”