Baton Rouge – Doctors and pharmacists who are providing health care services to Hurricane Katrina evacuees and need information about which prescription drugs an evacuee took before fleeing his or her home can now get that information online.
KatrinaHealth.org, http://katrinahealth.org, is a free, secure online service that medical providers can access to get the prescription drug history of evacuees.
The system is only accessible to authorized health care professionals and pharmacists, who are providing treatment of supporting the provision of treatment to evacuees.
To ensure that only authorized physicians use KatrinaHealth.org, the American Medical Association will be providing physician credentialing and authentification services. The AMA will validate the identity of health care providers, a key step in ensuring patient confidentiality and security.
For independent pharmacies, the National Community Pharmacists Association will authenticate and provide access and for chain pharmacies, SureScripts will provide these services on behalf of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores.
Through KatrinaHealth.org, doctors and pharmacists can avoid medical errors by viewing an evacuee’s prescription history online, obtaining available patient allergy information and other alerts, viewing drug interaction reports and alerts, seeing therapeutic duplication reports and alerts and querying clinical pharmacology drug information.
In addition, doctors or pharmacists who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina can use KatrinaHealth.org to access their own patients’ files and obtain information about prescriptions they had written or filled previously.
“As we work to treat our citizens and give them the care they deserve in these unusual circumstances, tools such as this one help ensure that we can provide a coordinated system of patient care,” said LDH Secretary Dr. Fred Cerise.
-end-