Grants Awarded for Technology

The University of California Davis Institute for Population Health Improvement (IPHI) through their California eQuality (CHeQ) program, has awarded grants for $775,000. The awards made through their Rural HIE Incentive program will help four designated health information exchange providers in rural areas.

So far, HIE options for exchanging information electronically has been created for more than 30 acute care and critical access hospitals, community clinics, and behavioral health providers, serving nearly 3.5 million rural Californians. More than 700 physicians in these counties will benefit with better access to patient information.

To further accelerate the adoption of health information exchange throughout California, the IPHI Health eQuality program awarded $400,000 to L.A. Care, the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan to develop Blue Button functionality.

The Blue Button will enable L.A Care members to access their own prescription data online. The project is the first in California and among the first in the nation to develop the tool for Medicaid beneficiaries.

To increase the use of technology in the state, a Federal grant from HRSA’s Office for the Advancement of Telehealth for $750,000 was awarded to UC Davis Children’s Hospital at www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/children  to help newborns in rural areas.

Three grants were awarded through the new “Pediatric Emergency Assistance to Newborns Using Telehealth” (PEANUT) program. The program will provide clinicians at rural hospitals round-the-clock access to neonatologists and other subspecialists through the use of UC Davis secure video conferencing capabilities.

Madan Dhamar, principal investigator for the PEANUT program reports that “Four hospitals in the state were selected to launch the project because these hospitals are located in rural counties serving health professional shortage and medically underserved areas. Rural doctors and hospitals deliver great care, but have limited access to pediatric subspecialists. Without subspecialty guidance, newborn infants may be undertreated, receive inappropriate therapies, or face unnecessary transfers.”

She added, “It will now be possible by increasing access to pediatric cardiologists to help rural hospitals follow new guidelines for identifying infants with congenital heart disease and also help to avoid unnecessary neonatal transfers if physicians rule out the condition in advance.”

For more information, go to www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/iphi.