Thursday, Oct. 6, 2005 -- The HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) today announced the award of more than $22.3 million to 16 grantees to implement health information technology (health IT) systems to improve the safety and quality of health care. These projects will contribute to AHRQ's capacity to learn from health IT implementation in clinical settings and to use the results from these real-world laboratories that are crucial to moving forward with broader implementation of health IT in American health care.

"Sharing successful best practices will be valuable to providers nationwide seeking to implement health IT systems that will improve patient safety and reduce hassle," HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "These grants help move our health care system closer to making the medical clipboard a thing of the past."

The recipients were selected from a group of AHRQ grantees who received health IT planning funds in 2004. This additional funding will allow them to carry out the plans they developed in their earlier grants. Eleven of the 16 grants were awarded to small and rural communities -- areas of special emphasis for AHRQ's health IT initiative.
Among the uses of health IT the newly funded implementation projects will focus on are sharing health information between providers, laboratories, pharmacies and patients and helping to ensure safer patient transitions between health care settings, as well as reducing medication errors and duplicative and unnecessary testing. For example:
*\tAt Franklin Foundation Hospital in coastal Louisiana, where health care providers are still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, safety net health care providers will integrate health information and communications systems to support chronic disease management, improve patient safety and eliminate duplication of effort.
*\tThe University of Tennessee and its partners will develop an integrated electronic health record for children with special health care needs to improve the coordination of services, continuity of care, timeliness of follow-up services and patient tracking.
*\tThe Holomua project in Hawaii will implement a health IT system to improve the flow of information among patients, community health centers and hospitals serving ethnic minorities, immigrants and other vulnerable populations during transitions of care between primary and tertiary care facilities.
*\tChadron Community Hospital in Nebraska will implement a regional health information exchange within an established collaborative of rural hospitals, clinics and providers across a 14,000-square-mile remote area of Nebraska.

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