If enacted, the law would be funded with a $13 million federal grant that would be used to build a server that medical groups around the state could access. To cover continuing costs, hospitals would pay an annual fee to participate in the exchange. Participation rates have not been decided, but hospital leaders do not anticipate it being cost prohibitive.

“The purpose is to improve communications among providers, to improve the quality of health care delivery and to lower the cost of health care,” says state Sen. Josh Stein, a Raleigh Democrat.

The legislation has widespread support from doctors and hospitals.

If someone is on vacation away from home and has an accident, an emergency room doctor could pull the person’s full medical history and have a better idea of treatment, according to proponents of the bill. In addition, a person’s primary care physician could see what other specialists might have been seen and get a fuller picture of a person’s medical history.

“I just think it’s a matter of life-saving and limb-saving priority that information should be readily available,” says Bill Atkinson, president of WakeMed Health and Hospitals. “Eventually, I hope it goes nationwide.”

For older adults who receive multiple treatments, the information exchange would help doctors know which tests have already been completed, which could result in savings, says Novlet Bradshaw, vice president and chief information officer at Rex Healthcare, part of UNC Health Care.

“We’re excited about this,” she says. “This is really needed, especially from a patient’s perspective.”

Doctors and hospitals already keep detailed electronic histories of their patients. They just don’t have a good way of sharing that information – especially statewide. In some cases, a physician will fax a printout to a specialist who requests a medical history.

“I suspect it will not be a whole lot of cost,” Bradshaw says.

Furthermore, she says it would likely result in an overall savings for hospitals.

The network would be as secure as possible, Stein says, to maximize protection against identity theft. Though, as with all things, Stein says he could not guarantee complete privacy because of the nature of the record keeping. For that reason there will be a clause for patients to opt out of the program if they do not want their medical information shared on the network.

“It would be heavily protected and secure,” assures Linwood Jones, general counsel with the N.C. Hospital Association.

In Atkinson’s opinion, patients would be foolish not to allow a doctor to share patient medical history with another doctor and points out that many of the current forms of sharing information, think the fax machine, are far less secure than the electronic system would be.

“You have the ability to see your own records from wherever they come from, so you get to check over your own records,” Atkinson says, adding that information is key “any time you are dealing with something as important as your own personal health.”

“You control your own data,” Atkinson, who serves on the board of directors of the N.C. Health Information Exchange, says.

Many hospital systems with more than one campus already use secure networks to transfer data, and the proposed statewide system would act in a similar – but much larger – fashion. Stein calls it a “backbone” that would allow individual systems to communicate with each other.

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