RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, in conjunction with the New Jersey E-Prescribing Action Coalition, an industry-academic partnership involving RAND Health; Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey; the e-prescribing vendors AllScripts, Caremark iScribe, and InstantDx; Caremark's prescription benefit management plans; the electronic prescription routing companies RxHub and SureScripts; Caremark's mail-order pharmacy; the consulting firm Point-of-Care Partners; the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ); and Walgreen's retail pharmacies will conduct the pilot in New Jersey. In addition to testing the standards, the project will determine changes in drug use, clinical outcomes, and patient satisfaction as a result of e-prescribing.

Develops a regional collaborative and business plan for implementing health IT in a rural region; also conducts a telemedicine demonstration project to assess the barriers and issues of broad health IT intervention including telemedicine/teleradiology, scan/store medical record, chronic disease registry and personal health record, and linking the region's partners.

Diabetes is a major public health problem that disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic minorities, those with lower socioeconomic status, and individuals with limited health literacy. The translational gap between research and practice may be particularly wide in safety net settings, which disproportionately care for such populations. We propose collaborating with a Medicaid managed care health plan to evaluate the implementation of tailored, proactive health IT models to promote patient-centeredness and patient safety in chronic disease care.

Evaluated the effects of staggered installation of an Epic health IT system that includes an EMR with provider order entry and clinical decision support in primary care settings on quality, safety, and resource use within a large integrated delivery system on cohort of 780,000 members with chronic illnesses.

Expanded an established Web-based, interactive Diabetes Mellitus Registry that provides patient histories and needed tests at the point of care among public, private, and not-for-profit health care providers; also tracks the diabetes population to identify trends in key indicators of care.

Thirty-three states and 1 territory formed the HISPC, which aims to address the privacy and security challenges presented by electronic health information exchange through multi-state collaboration. With the support of its state or territorial governor, each team engaged a steering committee and a range of local stakeholders to 1) assess variations in organization-level business policies and state laws that affect health information exchange; 2) identify and propose practical solutions, while preserving the privacy and security requirements in applicable Federal and State laws and 3) develop detailed plans to implement solutions.

The objective of this research study is to examine the effect of a novel "internet intervention" for patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea syndrome (OSA) who are prescribed the gold-standard treatment, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). The intervention combines data that is sent wirelessly from the CPAP unit and an internet-based website that facilitates patient-centered, collaborative management. The main goal of the intervention is that it will provide the care that OSA patients want and need, at the time they want and need it.

Diabetes is a major, growing, and costly chronic disease in the U.S., and implementation of recommended diabetes care remains poor, not merely suboptimal, and varied for a sizable proportion of Americans with diabetes. To further reduce the treatment and adherence gaps in diabetes care, we propose to evaluate a Customized, Continuous Care Management (CCCM) program that actively supports a partnership between the patient and his/her multidisciplinary care management (CM) team using an online disease management (ODM) system, which is integrated with a comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) system that includes a personal health record and secure patient-clinician messaging capabilities. Our CCCM program builds upon CM strategies proven effective in past studies and creates an ODM system that is built upon and fully integrated with a leading, commercially available EHR product - providing a blueprint for instituting customized, continuous care management for many different chronic conditions in a range of ambulatory care settings.

Thirty-three states and 1 territory formed the HISPC, which aims to address the privacy and security challenges presented by electronic health information exchange through multi-state collaboration. With the support of its state or territorial governor, each team engaged a steering committee and a range of local stakeholders to 1) assess variations in organization-level business policies and state laws that affect health information exchange; 2) identify and propose practical solutions, while preserving the privacy and security requirements in applicable Federal and State laws and 3) develop detailed plans to implement solutions.