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Healthcare Journal of Baton Rouge
| September / October 2008 Issue | healthcarejournalbr.com
The launch was not without problems. “One thing we quickly
learned about RVs–they are meant for camping, not running
all this high-powered equipment, so we were at the mercy of
generators,” explained Matessino. Three generators ran the
AC, lights, dental equipment, and a small sterilizer. The clinic
would show up, a generator would go down, and the sched-
ule fell apart. So the clinic had an electrician convert the RV
to land power for a more trustworthy electrical source.
Matessino then went to the individual schools and asked, “If I
install the plugs will you pay for the electricity?” They agreed
and custom electrical outlets were installed at each school in
the clinic's designated spot. Now the clinics are totally on land
power and Matessino has learned her lesson. “If we get
another one, we would get one fully equipped and ready to
run on land power.”
profile: pointe coupee hIt network
The Pointe Coupee Parish Health Information Technology
Partnership (Pointe Coupee HIT Network) is an unincorporated
association of rural healthcare providers and healthcare organiza-
tions in Pointe Coupee Parish, whose principal purpose is to
coordinate organizational and community-wide implementation
of health information technology for the improvement of patient
safety, cost, and quality of healthcare. The network includes
Pointe Coupee General Hospital, a 25 bed critical access hospital
(CAH); the CAH's transfer tertiary hospital, Our Lady of the
Lake Regional Medical Center (OLOL), and four local rural
health clinics managed by OLOL; a Federally Qualified Health
Center (FQHC) with two sites in the parish; one local communi-
ty clinic; two private practice primary care clinics; and one home
health agency. The network members make up the backbone of
the healthcare delivery system in the Pointe Coupee area and
have a long history of working collaboratively as innovators in
rural network development. The network will also include advi-
sory members from state-level health information technology
(HIT) and health information exchange (HIE) initiatives that
include: the Bureau of Primary Care and Rural Health (the state's
Rural Hospital Medicare Flexibility Program [FLEX] grantee),
the Louisiana Health Information Exchange, the Rural Health
Information Technology Partnership, and the Louisiana Health
Care Quality Forum.
The mission of the network is to fully implement functional elec-
tronic health records with practice management system capabili-
ties within each network partner organization and to enable
appropriate health information exchange among all partner
organizations. Once HIT is implemented at the individual
provider level and connected through an information exchange
environment, the network will have the capacity to provide the
communication, information, and assessment platform for
informed decision making and efficient management of health-
care delivery information and processes. Determined by the
needs expressed in the healthcare community and knowledge of
the value a HIT network may bring to healthcare services, the
goals of this rural health networking project are:
(1) Improve coordination of care
(2) Increase quality of care
(3) Provide cost savings to the system.
The project's goals link directly to the Healthy People 2010 goal
to increase the quality and years of healthy life.
We are seeing a lot of pathol-
ogy, a lot of dental caries, a
lot of kids that have to be in
dental pain. You can't learn
with a tooth-ache, you can't
pay attention, you hurt, you
are miserable, you can get
into infection.
-Linda Matessino