Last week, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology announced that it would award two additional grants for the Beacon Communities program, on top of the 15 grants given earlier in May. One of the 15 grantees is Geisinger Health System, which is receiving $16 million over three years to form the Keystone Beacon Community in central Pennsylvania and demonstrate how EMRs and other health IT can improve outcomes and reduce healthcare expenditures.

With the money, Geisinger plans on extending the Keystone Health Information Exchange (KeyHIE) across five counties, applying some of the health system's own health IT expertise. "What [Keystone Beacon Community] really gives us the opportunity to do is take bits and pieces that we have already executed somewhere and put them into an integrated system that includes everybody in the community in care coordination and health IT," Geisinger's chief health information officer, Dr. James Walker, says in an interview with CMIO.

"What we proposed for the Keystone Beacon Community is that we would take those skills in care coordination and supporting care coordination with health IT and extend them, provide them in a non-Geisinger form, to all of the hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities [and] home health facilities in a five-county region," Walker explains.

With ONC imposing an ambitious timeline, Geisinger will build Keystone Beacon Community with low-cost, simple technology that doesn't need much customization or require a lot of user training. "Starting from that, we asked: 'What do clinicians really need to take care of patients?'" Walker says. The answer, he believes, are test results and clinical summaries, preferably in the Continuity of Care Document format.

"Both from a usability standpoint on the user side and also [in terms of] cost and simplicity of technology on the technology side, we found that document store is a useful way for us to start. We do translate lab results into LOINC, so there is some semantic interoperability in the exchange, and certainly our goal over time is to make the information more and more semantically interoperable."

For more information:
- read this Q&A with Walker in CMIO

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