LOS ANGELES – L.A. Care Health Plan’s board is expected to approve individual community clinic awards totaling $2 million for the adoption of health information technology through its HIT initiative.
“Part of our mission is to improve healthcare for underserved populations and strengthen safety-net providers who serve them,” said Elaine Batchlor, MD, CMO of L.A. Care. “Our investment in health IT for community clinics is intended to ensure that low-income communities participate in the healthcare quality benefits that we expect to result from increased use of HIT.”
L.A. Care is the largest U.S. public health plan, with nearly 800,000 Los Angeles County residents enrolled through programs such as Medi-Cal, Healthy Families and Healthy Kids.
Funding will enable selected community clinics to implement disease registry/chronic disease management systems, e-prescribing and electronic health records (EHRs).
In 2006, L.A. Care collaborated with the UniHealth Foundation and Kaiser Permanente in Phase I of the Building Clinic Capacity for Quality (BCCQ), which helped assess clinics’ readiness for health IT, particularly for EHRs, and provided recommendations.
The Blue Shield of California Foundation has joined the BCCQ Phase I collaborators to support Phase II, which will provide education, technical assistance and on-site support for Technology-Enabled Quality Improvement projects.
Mary Odell, president of the UniHealth Foundation, said community clinics had been requesting assistance from health plans and foundations. Rather than independently considering the requests, they decided to partner as co-funders.
“Community clinics are under pressure to submit data to participate in pay-for-performance programs,” she said. But that requires a health IT infrastructure, which exacts greater cost, resource and workflow tolls on already-strapped community clinics.
“Because HIT has not been built in the community clinics and requires significant change for them, you need all the players in the healthcare ecosystem to be involved,” said Deborah Schwab, director of Health and Technology for the Blue Shield of California Foundation.
With L.A. Care’s contracts with providers in numerous programs, Odell said the health plan brought a “broad provider perspective” to the table. Its clinical expertise and intellectual resources also delivered “great added value,” she said.