New California Organization Launched to Reduce Harm to ER Patients

You may be interested and saddened to hear that as many as 50,000 Californians daily may be receiving harmful medical care because doctors in ERs, hospitals, ambulances or offices lack information critical to making the right treatment decisions. Patient medical history, medications and lab records are frequently missing, inaccessible or illegible. In our fragmented, disorderly health system, no single information network exists to assure timely -- meaning instantly, if needed -- access to accurate patient information for those who are caring for patients. So, another sad statistic: 1,825,000 patients are more or less at risk of being harmed by information-based failures of the system each year.

CalRHIO ( California Regional Health Information Organization) is a new non-profit group working to close that gap with a state of the art patient information storage and retrieval system accessible any time from anywhere to qualified providers. They have a long way to go but the outlook and potential are very promising.

To learn about CalRHIO, visit their website at www.calrhio.com. CHCC will be alerting its members and others how they can help advance CalRHIO’s work in future communications. Stay tuned.