Medicaid programs work on shared EMRs

Here's a nice example of voluntary collaboration between state governments. A group of states who got federal grants for Medicaid IT improvement have agreed to share their project results with other states, giving the others a leg up on the often-onerous development process. Twenty-seven states got a total of $103.6 million from CMS earlier this year to develop EMRs and related systems. Now about half of those states have begun sharing their work with states that didn't get the grants. For example, there's Arizona, which got about $11.75 million to build a Medicaid health information exchange for statewide use. Arizona will create a Web-based, networked EMR open to all Arizona doctors treating Medicaid patients. Now, a total of 12 other states, including Connecticut, Hawaii, Kentucky and Wisconsin will begin to build applications around Arizona's core system.

To get more background on Medicaid EMR efforts:
- read this Government Health IT article

ALSO: An expert advisory panel is recommending that the federal government help Medicaid agencies boost their health IT usage. Article

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