Warwick enrolling city workers in ER Card program

Warwick received a $75,000 grant from the Rhode Island Foundation last November to pilot an electronic personal health-record program that is proving to lower health care costs and improve employee health and wellness.
Since many doctors’ offices and hospitals do not have a system to share patient information, they do not have access to a patient’s medical history and medications. Instead, they rely on the patients themselves to relay the information or wait for records to come in the mail from other providers – which doesn’t help much in an emergency situation.
Enter ER Card.
The West Warwick-based company gives consumers control over their own health records by allowing them to continually update their medical records electronically, and carry that record around with them via a card or USB Flash Drive – both of which are password protected for security, explained ER Card co-founder Maria Gil.
By giving doctors and paramedics access to complete and up-to-date medical history instantly online, the ER Card eliminates the problems an unknown medical history can cause – like redundant testing and prescribing medications that contraindicate prescriptions the patient is already taking. It also eliminates excess paperwork that patients have to fill out when seeing a new doctor, and the time it takes for medical staff to process that information, said Janice Gil, co-founder of ER Card.
“The medical industry is the last of the manila-folder generation,” she said. “People don’t want to fill out a clipboard every time they go to see a doctor, and [ER Card] eliminates that paperwork, because it makes all of your information available and coordinates information between your providers.”
Warwick Mayor Scott Avedisian, who previously worked in the health care industry, is known to be proactive about health and wellness programs and advocated for use of the ER Card many years ago.
With his support, the ER Card program was installed on laptops in all of the city’s ambulances, giving emergency medical technicians (EMT) in Warwick access to the information they need to treat patients in an emergency situation – including medications, vitamins and herbal supplements that can have an effect on prescriptions, as well as a patient’s blood type, allergies, emergency contacts, prior surgeries, chronic conditions, and more.
(EMTs can access ER Card data without a patient’s passwords, because the patient can not always share the emergency medical data themselves.) “We use ER Card technology on all of our rescues, so as long as an individual is signed up for ER Card, the EMT can access the patient’s data on the way to the incident and be prepared for the situations they walk into,” Avedisian said.
Beyond better patient care and less paperwork, the ER Card also lowers compliance reporting costs. In 2007, Avedisian reported that use of the ER Card led to about 15 percent savings in costs associated with the city’s compliance with the R.I. Department of Health’s reporting requirements.
“Health care is the largest component of any budget,” Avedisian said. “Because [ER Card] allows us to manage health care by organizing data, already we see utilization [of extraneous health-related services] going down.”
So far, about half of the city’s employees are enrolled in ER Card, Maria Gil said, and the one-year grant from the RI Foundation supports efforts to enroll as many city workers and citizens as possible. Avedisian is working to get more funding to continue that effort, he said.
“Electronic medical records are the wave of the future,” Avedisian said. “Everyone is talking about it, and here, we are showing that we use it and it works.”
Though patient information gathered by ER Card is kept private by law, medical-diagnosis trends are available, and are being used by the city to create programs based on those trends, Avedisian said. For instance, recent ER Card data showed a high rate of diabetes among city workers, so the city’s wellness nurse sent an e-mail blast to all city employees offering a cooking class for diabetics on Thursday nights, Avedisian said.
“Of course, we don’t know who is diagnosed with what … but we are able to track trends and use the data to promote health and wellness,” he said.
The ER Card is available to anyone, and the cost for an individual member is $8 per month, or $96 per year. The program is an eligible expense for payment with pretax dollars through Flexible Spending Accounts.
Several other communities throughout the state have started using the system, but budget constraints have limited implementation, Maria Gil said. Her hope is that the pilot program in Warwick will prove the value of ER Card to other communities and more widespread adoption occurs. &#8226