New York’s Primary Care Information Project – Moving Ahead

As part of our visit last week, Josh and I made sure to stop in at New York City’s Primary Care Information Project. As today’s press release indicates, PCIP is demonstrating success in promoting electronic health record use among New York City physicians.

There is a component of this work that involves implementation of the personal health record, and we spent time with Melinda Jenkins, Ph.D., FNP, and Joslyn Levy, RN, to learn more about this part of the project. We were given a demonstration of the patient portal that comes bundled with the eClinicalWorks product. As I have seen at the installation in Washington, DC, eCW has relatively robust integration within the EHR for patient access. I have not yet seen this in action personally, but I did speak with Sal Volpe, MD, a user of both the eCW EHR and PHR (see this post for that conversation).

The success that PCIP has achieved has come from focusing on the build for the provider side of the system. We learned that the patient access component is coming with the “Cycle 2” portion of the project, which was scheduled to be kicked off the day after we visited (good timing!). In the meantime, Melinda and the team have been working on improvements to the out-of-the-box portal to promote self-management and longitudinal care.

Since Melinda is a contributor to this blog (see her posts here), we’ll let her continue to fill in the readership on her work. So far, the news is good from New York that health information technology can be implemented in our care system, even for the most vulnerable populations.

We stopped in to say hi to Mat Kendall, MPH, PCIP’s Director of Operations, and second to none (even including myself, I think) in the optimism department. Mat is a pro at creating visual systems in his office, which he graciously allowed me to photograph and display here, as great examples. Students of the Toyota Management System will appreciate the impact of keeping this work visible. Keep up the great work, New York!

Click on any image to see it full size

Ted Eytan, MD