RICHARDSON, TX – By the first business day after Hurricane Rita hit Texas, Sept. 26, 830,000 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas members had electronic clinical summaries created for them in an effort to provide uninterrupted healthcare treatment for those who became displaced.Providing members with electronic summaries was already a part of the plan's long-term business strategy, but BCBSTX was able to create a special run for all members within four days, thanks in large part to its technology infrastructure and MEDecision.

Although volume usage has not been tracked, Joe Taylor, vice president of enterprise business processes, said BCBSTX's response team call center nurses got requests out to providers within 30 minutes.

The telephonic piece – critical for this disaster – will continue to have a place in the long-term plan. While larger hospitals and physician groups in Texas have electronic medical record systems, smaller physician offices often do not.

Part of BCBSTX's overall strategy is to allow providers, even those who only have a PC, Internet connection and printer, HIPAA-compliant access to the summaries.

"Instead of trying to hit home runs, we should hit a few singles and empower people and build upon these successes," said Taylor. "We recognize providers are in different places along the continuum (of EMR adoption). Our goal is to plug them in wherever they can."

For this service to be successfully implemented, given today's low EMR adoption, payers need to have a good paper delivery and sophisticated clinical processing systems in place, said David St. Clair, founder and CEO of MEDecision.

"The long-term plan is to make these electronic clinical summaries part of the normal workflow for hospitals," he said.

Two lessons were learned from Hurricane Rita, according to Eric Brown, vice president of healthcare and life sciences at Forrester Research. "Disaster recovery and emergency management is yet another reason for the healthcare sector to commit to EMRs, and health plans are in a much stronger position to contribute to the effort of building complete electronic health records than has been previously recognized in the development of regional health information networks," he said.

BCBSTX has returned to its normal schedule to provide monthly updates to its summaries for the entire membership by the end of 2006 and beginning of 2007.