Arizona e-Health Connection’s 2nd Annual Convention was held in early May in Phoenix, with nearly 400 attending the first day and 250 on the second day.


While the summit highlighted the health IT work being done in Arizona, namely with the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the Arizona Rural Health Information Technology Adoption Program and the Southern Arizona Health Information Exchange, it also presented a view of what’s happening on the national level and the variety of e-health models out there.


It was a good strategy, considering that many attendees were clinicians looking at how to deploy e-prescribing and electronic medical record systems.


Governor Janet Napolitano delivered her Governor’s Address on the opening day, and days after the Summit issued an Executive Order (pdf) to increase patient safety through the state’s use of e-prescribing.


The Summit included an e-prescribing panel with representatives from SureScripts and RxHub, as well as a panel on “Provider Experiences with e-Prescribing and EMRs.” In the latter panel, providers gave a candid account of pitfalls they encountered and discussed the size and scalability of their projects and ways EMRs can increase revenue in the practice.


The panel “HIEs across the country” featured three operational health information exchanges. Executive director of Arizona Health-e Connection Brad Tritle noted that bringing together key members of successful HIEs was more important than bringing in subject matter experts.


The key, he said, is to give communities access to those people who are achieving health information exchange in the real world. “The realm of how to do this is not as wide as everyone thinks,” he said.


The purpose of the panel, which included Debbie Banik, program director of Clinical Messaging Service for the Indiana Health Information Exchange, Edward Barthell, MD, executive director of the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange, and Jim Hansen, CEO of CareEntrust, was to share common issues and challenges HIEs face and to address the question of how to successfully share information statewide.


William Yasnoff, MD, PhD, managing partner of NHII Advisors, gave a comprehensive tutorial on the health record banking (HRB) model in his presentation, “A Feasible Path to Sustainable Community Health Information Infrastructure.”


“There’s no point in building a large-scale HIE,” he said. “You need to have a believable story for sustainability to have people pay for it.” The appeal of HRBs is its ability to address what he called the “right problem” – sustainability and an electronic medical record that protects privacy.


“If you want to solve the problem and deliver comprehensive data at the point of care, all data has to be electronic,” he said. And that means all physicians have to have EMRs.


While some communities are building HRB systems, such as Louisville, Kansas City, Washington State, the Ocala RHIO in Florida and Oregon (through a Medicaid Transformation Grant), Yasnoff said it will take another 12 months to see a true HRB in production in which consumers are in charge.


“Once one of these succeeds, it could spread very, very quickly,” he said.


Yasnoff said the Summit presented good content and was well-organized and well-attended. Approximately 150 attended his presentation. What was heartening, said Yasnoff, was that “people really want to solve this problem.”