EHR Pilot Project

The AAFP led a small-scale, collaborative pilot project to study and promote the transition to a paperless office and the use of electronic health records (EHR) in small- and medium-sized family practices. The pilot project recruited 18 family medicine practices, each paired with a sponsoring organization in the local community. Of these, an initial six practices began implementation in the fall of 2003.

Each office implemented the MedPlexus XML- and Java-based EHR software application over a six-month period, at no cost to them. Siemens Medical Solutions, Hewlett-Packard, and MedPlexus generously committed to host the application, and provided the software, training, and application management free of charge to the participating practices. The Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the nation?s largest health IT industry membership organization, co-administered the pilot with AAFP.

The pilot project?s main objective was to intensively study the barriers and keys to success for implementation, and combine this goal with a proof-of-concept for the applications service provider (ASP) model of delivery of scalable EHR systems. A secondary goal was to identify the special needs of small and solo practices and help MedPlexus, and subsequently other vendors, address those needs in their EHRs.