June 23rd, 2008

The Pennsylvania Medical Society was awarded a grant by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development from the Broadband Outreach and Aggregation Fund (BOAF) to continue its ConnectTheDocs broadband initiative, which aims to provide broadband access to physicians without such service while improving speed and reliability of current users; according to a press release from PaMed.

The society will use the grant money to help physicians learn about and adopt health information technology.  PaMed describes the benefits of this technology as follows:

“For physicians, better telecommunications connectivity means they can effectively use new tools that improve the efficiency of their practice. Such tools include electronic prescribing, consulting electronically with specialists on radiology and other diagnostic tests, and communicating more quickly and efficiently with hospitals.

Patients whose physicians use these electronic tools benefit directly through decreased prescription errors, more timely access to records, and, ultimately, reduction in duplicate testing.”