Poudre Valley Health System took another step last week toward improving patient health, safety and satisfaction by registering its intent to achieve “meaningful use” of electronic health records.
Adopting electronic health records that can be more easily shared by doctors and healthcare providers means doctors will know more about the patients they see and will have easier access to information about patients that can help them make decisions about diagnoses and treatments. It will also allow patients who have access to their records to be more active in their health and care. And it should cut down on the amount of paper we generate and paperwork our patients have to complete.
Bottom line: The potential for better care, patient safety and informed patients, all of which benefit the patient and their provider.
January was our first chance to register the intent, and we jumped at it for those reasons, joining three other Denver metro-area health systems — The Children’s Hospital, Denver Health and Centura Health — as the only Colorado healthcare providers to do so. Registration qualifies PVHS and the other three systems for federal stimulus funds under the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, to develop and implement electronic health records.
Rulon
