ALBANY - Governor David A. Paterson announced today that $105 million in grants have been awarded to 19 leading community-based health information technology (IT) projects. The grants are central to the state’s strategy to ensure that clinical information is in the hands of clinicians and their patients to help guide medical decisions and support the delivery of more coordinated, patient-centered care. Grants range from $1 million to $10 million each.

“Electronic health records will begin to repair our fragmented delivery system by making sure that accurate patient information is quickly available so that we can improve health care quality and efficiency,” said Governor Paterson. “Electronic health records represent a cornerstone in the transformation of our health care system. They will boost our efforts to improve the delivery of preventative care while maintaining appropriate safeguards to protect patient privacy.”

The recipients will build a technical infrastructure that will support health care improvements for all New Yorkers, while ensuring the privacy and security of health information. The projects selected the following clinical goals to guide the technical implementation ensuring that clinicians gain upfront, consistent value from the vastly improved availability and use of health information, including:

• Medicaid: Linking Medicaid data to interoperable electronic health records so that clinicians may electronically receive a patient's Medicaid-reimbursed prescriptions, Medicaid eligibility and recertification period, as well as Medicaid's preferred drugs. This will allow clinicians to prescribe medications electronically and make informed decisions about appropriate and lower-cost therapeutically equivalent medicines at the time the prescription is ordered. It will also provide clinical decision support alerts, such as drug interactions, to improve care and reduce costs.
• Public Health: Linking electronic health records to the New York State Immunization Registry to ensure seamless reporting of immunization records to improve children’s health. Embedding prevention measures in electronic health records for reporting to clinicians and public health officials will help transform New York’s health care system from a focus on disease care to one focused on prevention. Exchanging information among public health officials and providers to achieve automated and streamlined public health monitoring and reporting will reduce costs.
• Patients: Helping New Yorkers have greater control over and access to their personal health information by connecting patients and clinicians through personal health records and other patient-focused tools.
• Quality of Care: Implementing quality measurement and reporting capabilities, which includes shared infrastructure among payers and providers to collect and assess information about performance and outcomes to support new prevention and outcome-based reimbursement models.