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Patients at a Bolivar hospital are now able to view their medical records by using their G-mail accounts. KSMU’s Royal Yates has more.
Citizens Memorial Healthcare of Bolivar is integrating its electronic medical records system with Google Health.
Google Health is a system that lets patients see their personal health records over the internet.
Tamera Heitz-Peek is the Director of Marketing at CMH, and she says she thinks this partnership was the next logical step in advancing the hospital’s records system.
“This big change didn’t happen all of a sudden. We have been very progressive in how we handle our electronic medical records. We have been doing electronic medical records since 2003. We’ve been working on this, and we are actually leaders in this area for rural hospitals,” said Heitz-Peek
Citizens Memorial has been recognized many times since implementing its first electronic medical record in 2003. It was known as the ‘Most Wired’ hospital in the area from 2005 to 2007, and was named in the Hospital & Health Networks Top 100 Hospitals in 2008.
It is the first rural hospital to partner with Google Health, and the third integrated health system to adopt the tool in the United States.Lauren Fraser, Information Systems Specialist at CMH, says they’re happy to be able to use the Google Health system, and that it was actually easy to integrate.
“We didn’t have to make a whole lot of changes to adopt this new system. We partnered with Iatric systems and they actually did all of the technical integration, but since we were already recording all of our patient data into an electronic medical record, it was just getting that integration pieced together to be able to send that information to Google Health,” said Fraser.
With new technology comes the threat of identity theft and hackers. Fraser, however, says she has faith in the hospital’s new system.
“It is safe and secure. We’re all in the process of keeping medical information secure whether it’s from within our own EMR, or the integration with Iatric systems, or Google Health. It’s in our best interest to keep it secure, and we use state of the art technology to make sure it stays that way.”
CMH is also receiving ‘Stage 7’ status from the Health Information and Management Systems Society. That’s the highest rank any healthcare system in the society can achieve.
For KSMU News, I’m Royal Yates.
