NAME OF NETWORK: 
Pointe Coupee Parish Health Information Technology       

Partnership

Name of Grantee              
Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals

Bureau of Primary Care and Rural Health

Principal Investigator: 
Margaret Shipman, State Office of Rural Health Director

Address:  628 North 4th Street, 8th Floor  Baton Rouge, LA 70802                            
Phone: (225) 342-1889
FAX: (225) 342-5839

Project Purpose
The purpose of the proposed network is to fully implement functional electronic health records within each network partner organization and to enable appropriate sharing of health information among all partner organizations. The primary partners include a critical access hospital (CAH), home health and hospice agency (HHA), two locations of a federally qualified health center (FQHC), four rural health clinics (RHC), one community clinic, two private physician practices and a 761-bed tertiary care center (TCC).  The network will allow qualified providers to access the patient data located in any and all of the network member systems.

Outcome Measure/Expectations
The objective of this grant is unique in that it is built on the premise of data sharing not data exchange. 

1. Implement a functional Electronic Medical Record for each of the partners
2. Develop a Community Portal that integrates systems at the network level.  The portal will employ a federated data model that allows each network member system to access and present data without having to move data from its local database.
3. The Community Portal will present data from all partner applications via a single web-based portlet which will create a data view specific to the clinician’s workflow

Service Area
The Pointe Coupee HIT Network will serve the Pointe Coupee Parish service area, which is located in south central Louisiana approximately 1 hour from the capital of Baton Rouge.  Agricultural production is a mainstay of the economy. Pointe Coupee is one of the most diverse agricultural parishes in the state. Close to 165,000 acres of land are used to farm cotton, sugarcane, soybeans, corn, milo, wheat, cattle, hay, vegetables, rice, crawfish and pecans.  The 2006 estimated population for Pointe Coupee Parish was 22,648 (U.S. Census, 2007). The largest town in Pointe Coupee Parish is New Roads (home to Pointe Coupee General Hospital), with close to 5,000 residents.  Only 69% of the population aged 25 years and older has earned a high school diploma. The unemployment rate is high, with only 55% of residents at age 16 or older in the labor force. Consequently, 23% of all individuals and 19% of all families in the parish are below the poverty level.  Over 40% of area residents receive some form of public assistance and 27% of the community is enrolled in Medicaid.

Network Members

Equipment/vendors

Hospital CPSI
Home Health – Lewis
FQHC – EHS
BACH – Not selected
Portal – Fusion CareFx

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