Regional health IT extension centers have already recruited more than 28,000 physicians and have been signing providers up at a rate of 1,000 each week over the past three months, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT.
Some of the centers are already far along towards meeting their primary care target enrollments. Those in Mississippi and Maine, for example, are at 60 percent of their goals.
The 62 extension centers located across the country offer in-practice technical assistance to providers to help them get over the hurdles of deploying electronic health records (EHRs) systems and to meet meaningful use requirements.
Each center has a goal of helping at least 1,000 physicians in their first two years of business, with a total target of more than 100,000 providers for all the centers. They offer a variety of services, including education, vendor selection and project management to establish the software and to redesign practice workflow.
ONC funding for the centers expires after two years.
ONC has also launched new tools to support the extension centers, including an interactive online community where they can exchange ideas; an education and marketing guide to assist in their outreach efforts; and a meaningful use vanguard of physicians who are early adopters and act as health IT ambassadors, said Mat Kendall, director of ONC's Office of Provider Adoption and Support, at a Dec. 14 ONC meeting on the progress of its programs.
Extension centers have honed their own approaches to assist the physicians in their areas. For instance, the Regional Extension Assistance Center for Health IT (REACH) in North Dakota has found that physicians in rural areas have difficulty in blocking out time to learn about extension centers because the clinic personnel wear multiple hats.
Providers also don't have the time to map out their workflows to understand how they might conduct process improvement with EHRs, said Dr. Paul Kleeberg, REACH clinical director.
For those area physicians, "we work closely with our REACH staff to slow down in order to go fast," in examining the local infrastructure and helping physicians envision and meet objectives for meaningful use, he said.
Broadband is a challenge in sparsely populated areas. In Park River, N.D., one clinic reported it would often lose its Internet connection when a truck goes by on the highway across the street.
"It appears that the main trunk line runs underneath the highway, and in some way the traffic disrupts it," Kleeberg said.
The Colorado Regional Extension Center (CO-REC) said its partner organizations that deal directly with physicians are the most critical component.
"Nothing can take the place of one-on-one with the providers to help them boil down exactly what they need to do," said Robyn Leone, director of CO-REC, which is part of the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization.
The Colorado extension center is conducting workshops first for those who already have EHRs and want to focus on meeting meaningful use soon and be able to receive their incentive payments in May, she said. In the spring of 2011, it will offer workshops for those providers who are not as far along and will concentrate on EHR deployment. Later in the year, it will hold a conference on assuring privacy and security.
