Reflections on Giving:
PAMF 2000 Annual Report
Health Care
To enhance delivery of services: E*Health Initiative
In recent years, information technology has touched nearly every aspect of our lives, and health care is no exception. In this era of too few physicians, too many patients and too little time, there is a very real need for innovative solutions that speed essential functions such as accessing patient records, sharing medical information and scheduling appointments. At the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, this revolution in the delivery of health care services is well underway, thanks to the foresight and generosity of donors Tom and Stacey Siebel.
An unexpected visit to our Urgent Care Center inspired the Siebels to contribute their support to PAMF. "We were so impressed with the attentiveness, courtesy and
professionalism extended to us, we wanted to see if there was a way we could help them in return," recalls Tom Siebel. "As a means of expressing our gratitude, we made a contribution so PAMF could use new technologies to provide an even higher level of care to the community." A major gift made in May 2000 by the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation established the Siebels as founding members of PAMF's "E*Health" initiative.
"There is no question in my mind that e-health is going to be a huge application of information technology," explains Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, the world's leading supplier of e-business application software. "I believe this will mark a major change in the way health care services are delivered," he continues, "not only for communication between physicians and patients, but also for remote diagnosis and health monitoring."
As it happened, Siebel's vision of the future of health care tracked perfectly with plans already underway at PAMF. In 1999, we began implementing an electronic medical record (EMR) system. By the time we settled into the new campus at the beginning of 2000, all Palo Alto division physicians were viewing patient records in the EMR. In addition, 30 physicians in Los Altos, Redwood Shores and Palo Alto were entering all their orders in the EMR, rendering their practices virtually paperless.
When they need to make medical decisions outside the clinic, PAMF physicians can now access the EMR securely from the hospital or their homes by using smartcards with PIN numbers that change every 60 seconds. By July 2000, all physicians in the Palo Alto division were entering prescriptions and sending messages to one another electronically, speeding up communications and laying the groundwork for PAMF's E*Health initiative.
In January 2001, we began testing PAMFOnline, a set of secure, Web-based services that enables patients to view key components of their own medical records online and communicate with PAMF. Patients were invited to enroll in the test phase and were provided access to PAMFOnline to request appointments, renew prescriptions, communicate with their physicians and access health-education materials endorsed by PAMF. Paul C. Tang, M.D., PAMF's Chief Medical Information Officer, who is overseeing implementation of the EMR and our E*Health initiative, says that a project is currently underway to enable secure, online "virtual medical visits" between patients and their physicians -- a feature that would greatly enhance access and convenience for our patients.
PAMF has taken strong measures to protect the confidentiality of patient information. Dr. Tang says that the security features and audit trails enabled by the EMR offer privacy protection unavailable with traditional paper charts. For example, all the information viewed and entered through PAMFOnline is stored only in a patient's EMR, in which access is password protected and restricted to those with a professional need to know, such as the patient's physician and other health care providers involved directly in a patient's care.
The final phase of our EMR rollout is underway, and we expect that all 212 physicians at the Palo Alto division will be working virtually without paper by the summer of 2002. PAMFOnline is currently offering enrollment to additional patients of the first group of participating physicians. A demonstration of PAMFOnline is available at www.pamfonline.org for public viewing. By the end of 2002, Dr. Tang expects that reliance on paper-based records will be a thing of the past for physicians and patients at PAMF.
"Why did I give?" says Siebel. "The story is really very simple: I had a personal experience with an organization that I thought provided exceptionally high-quality service to the community, and I thought they deserved my support."
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