"Sharing successful best practices will be valuable to providers nationwide seeking to implement health IT systems that will improve patient safety and reduce hassle," HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt said. "These grants help move our health care system closer to making the medical clipboard a thing of the past."

The recipients were selected from a group of AHRQ grantees who received health IT planning funds in 2004. This additional funding will allow them to carry out the plans they developed in their earlier grants. Eleven of the 16 grants were awarded to small and rural communities -- areas of special emphasis for AHRQ's health IT initiative.

Among the uses of health IT the newly funded implementation projects will focus on are sharing health information between providers, laboratories, pharmacies and patients and helping to ensure safer patient transitions between health care settings, as well as reducing medication errors and duplicative and unnecessary testing. For example:

• At Franklin Foundation Hospital in coastal Louisiana, where health care providers are still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, safety net health care providers will integrate health information and communications systems to support chronic disease management, improve patient safety and eliminate duplication of effort.
• The University of Tennessee and its partners will develop an integrated electronic health record for children with special health care needs to improve the coordination of services, continuity of care, timeliness of follow-up services and patient tracking.
• The Holomua project in Hawaii will implement a health IT system to improve the flow of information among patients, community health centers and hospitals serving ethnic minorities, immigrants and other vulnerable populations during transitions of care between primary and tertiary care facilities. · Chadron Community Hospital in Nebraska will implement a regional health information exchange within an established collaborative of rural hospitals, clinics and providers across a 14,000-square-mile remote area of Nebraska.

"These expanded projects are an important success story for health IT," said AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. "These grantees started from scratch, many in rural and underserved areas, and in less than a year they've laid the groundwork to build valuable health IT systems in their communities. They will improve care for their own patients, and their experiences will help others learn how to build health IT systems and serve their patients better."

These awards join 40 implementation grant recipients announced by HHS last year. With these 16 awards, AHRQ's investment in health IT totals more than $166 million. AHRQ is supporting President Bush's initiative to use health IT to improve the nation's health care system by promoting the adoption of health IT by local communities and health care providers, especially in rural and small communities, and working with states to develop regional health information networks.