Community clinics can access same medical record data as hospital participants to close gaps for underserved patients in Los Angeles County
LOS ANGELES – March 16, 2020 The Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services (LANES) announced today that five federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) now have access to its clinical data repository, enhancing primary care for the tens of thousands of LA County patients who frequent the community care clinics.
The five FQHC participants joining LANES are:
- South Central Family Health Center (SCFHC) for 36 years has played a major role in filling the void for comprehensive health services in the historically underserved and uninsured population of South Los Angeles. The services provided directly address healthcare issues prevalent among geographically and economically disadvantaged individuals and families.
- Via Care Community Health Center provides caring, affordable and high quality healthcare to those who call East Los Angeles home. Via Care takes pride in being part of the community it serves and looks forward to continuing to serve the health and well-being of patients.
- South Bay Family Health Care (SBFHC) is a leading community clinic system and one of Los Angeles County’s largest safety net providers, offering low quality, low-and-no cost healthcare in a warm and supportive environment to economically disadvantaged and uninsured populations throughout South Bay and Harbor Gateway communities.
- San Fernando Community Health Center (SFCHC) is a state-of-the-art FQHC located in the City of San Fernando and serving the entire San Fernando Valley. SFCHC is a patient-centered medical home, where patients are provided with compassionate, high quality and evidenced-based care.
- Universal Community Health Center (UCHC) was founded in 2009 by Dr. Edgar Chavez and is a patient-centered medical home located in South Los Angeles. The UCHC service delivery model provides comprehensive services across all life cycles, with a focus on prevention and empowerment of its patients to take charge of their health.
According to Anish P. Mahajan, M.D., MS, MPH, Chief Medical Officer, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and LANES Chairman of the Board, Los Angeles County’s safety-net healthcare system is highly fragmented, especially for underserved patients who depend on Medi-Cal or are uninsured.
“These patients tend to receive primary care services at a community clinic. From there, they are routinely referred to specialists like cardiology or oncology at a local public or private hospital,” he explained. “But what often happens is that their PCP experiences delays in obtaining their latest medical records from either the specialist or a local hospital ER. By accessing LANES, every LA County hospital and community clinic can work together in collaboration off the same health record data in real time to eliminate the fragmentation, effectively closing the loop in care for every underserved patient.”
The 2019 California’s Health Care Safety Net edition reports both the number of state FQHC organizations and the number of patients seen by them increased by 37 percent between 2013 and 2017. FQHCs saw 4.7 million patients in 2017, with Medi-Cal providing the majority of the funding for these patients.
Dr. Mahajan called the physicians and staff at community clinics “truly the quarterbacks of care” for underserved patients. “They synthesize all the information to figure out how best to care for the patient,” he said. “So instead of waiting a few days or more to receive a hospital’s faxed discharged summary or specialist’s recommendation for example, these clinic employees can use the LANES HIE portal to immediately look at their patients’ records online and find out if another local care site administered treatment recently and safely.”
About LANES
Los Angeles Network for Enhanced Services (LANES) is a community-based health information exchange (HIE) serving more than 500 health systems, hospitals and community clinics that administer care to residents of Los Angeles County. The secure regional HIE empowers clinicians to share collaboratively the same patient medical record 24/7 to inform care continuum services to enhance outcomes and eliminate fragmentation. Medi-Cal providers can tap into 2019 Cal-HOP funding to access LANES. Connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn or visit the LANES website.
