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ATLANTA, May 7, 2008 — Father Joe's Villages in San Diego, Calif., and McKesson's Practice Partner Patient Records, an advanced electronic health record, are helping improve care for thousands of indigent patients using donated software from McKesson. The Practice Partner solution is helping Father Joe's to improve medical record documentation and promote health screenings, It also enables the medical staff to develop benchmarking reports for areas such as prenatal care, psychiatric care, diabetic and asthmatic disease management.
Father Joe's Villages is a non-profit corporation that consists of several facilities offering a variety of services and programs to the homeless. "Practice Partner has been instrumental in helping us serve this very needy, and often overlooked population throughout the San Diego area and in Indio," said Dr. Margaret McCahill who serves as the Medical Director at the St. Vincent de Paul Village Family Health Center, which is a part of Father Joe's Village.
Father Joe's relies on more than 200 volunteers to help deliver care to the underserved. The complexity of this patient population, coupled with volunteer providers, requires an easy-to-use, intuitive system.
After a one-hour orientation, provider volunteers are able to document visits, place orders and write prescriptions in Practice Partner software the same day. "Our volunteers are also better able to document, manage and treat chronic illness and other conditions that would normally land our patients in emergency rooms," adds Dr. McCahill.
"Knowing that McKesson is helping underserved families, young children, men and women who are in need of healthcare is very satisfying and an example of our commitment to the well being of communities nationwide," said David Henriksen, vice president and general manager of McKesson's physician practice solutions.
Based in part on the success at St. Vincent de Paul Village, Practice Partner Patient Records has been successfully deployed at a similar clinic at another one of Father Joe's facilities that serves the underserved, called Martha's Village and Kitchen, in Indio, CA-a desert community northeast of San Diego. Practice Partner is also used at a unique mobile clinic concept-consisting of a 40-foot-long truck, fully outfitted with exam rooms, which travels to churches at various local communities to provide medical services at no charge to the homeless and uninsured throughout the San Diego area.
McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 18th on the FORTUNE 500, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to helping its customers deliver high-quality healthcare by reducing costs, streamlining processes, and improving the quality and safety of patient care. McKesson is the longest-operating company in healthcare today, and will mark 175 years of continuous operations in 2008. Over the course of its history, McKesson has grown by providing pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management across the spectrum of care; healthcare information technology for hospitals, physicians, homecare and payors; hospital and retail pharmacy automation; and services for manufacturers and payors designed to improve outcomes for patients. For more information, visit http://www.mckesson.com.
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