Epidemic of Gun Violence Hits Chicago Again

Recent reports of shootings in Chicago affecting Chicago Public School students, gang bangers, bystanders and others once again seem routine in newspaper headlines and in TV and radio spots. 

What's going on?  Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn complained that the only protest in favor of improved safety  from the general public was the innocent sound of crickets chirping in the night.  In other words, nothing.

Most view firearm violence as a crime issue, one for law and order to deal with.  Certainly that is true.  But, gun violence also follows the basic patterns of disease and we can use epidemiology to study disease patterns and causes.  Epidemiology is basically body counting; either sick bodies or bodies that have passed away.  The patterns tell us what's going on whether it is flu, cancer, heart disease, asthma or firearm deaths or injury.

Health care providers can help stamp out the vector of death and injury from guns since, like malaria and the mosquito, the vector is basically a gun.  Not the gun your uncle and brother use to go hunting on the weekend or for sports shooting at the local range.  In many cases, it's the one that's in the home. 

As part of the medical interview, health providers, whether in the emergency room or in primary care clinics need to ask if a gun is kept in the home.  If it is, is it locked away safely or is it kept unlocked and perhaps even loaded?

Epidemiology tells us that a firearm kept in the home increases the risk of a homicide occurring in the home by almost 3 times  and suicide by 5 times compared to homes where no gun is kept.  Although most gun deaths in Chicago are homicides, more than half of the gun deaths nation wide are suicides.

Doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners should ask patients if they keep a gun in the home and if they do advise to lock it safely and unloaded or get rid of it.  We do lock poisonous chemicals  in the kitchen cabinet to keep it away from kids, don't we?

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Smooth Go-Live For Electronic Health Record at Erie Humboldt Park

Smooth sailing and cool heads characterized the go-live for Erie Humboldt Park's electronic health record system.

Erie successfully launched it’s Alliance-hosted Electronic Health Record (EHR) system at Erie Humboldt Park on Thursday April 24, 2008. This is Erie's second large site to go live. Erie West Town turned on its electronic health record in August 2006.

The Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services, LLC was formed by 4 community health centers (Erie Family Health Center, Heartland Heatlth Outreach, Howard Brown Health Center and Near North Health Services) to improve the delivery of quality health care to underserved patient populations. The mission is to share resources and to integrate services thereby enhancing quality and economies of scale.

The centerpiece of the Alliance's mission to improve health care quality is to provide a centralized hosting model for a robust electronic health record system. The system has been customized to meet the needs of underserved patient populations with disproportinate shares of diseases such as HIV, diabetes, heart disease, asthma late entry into prenatal care and obesity.

Alliance partners use General Electric's Centricity EMR.

Erie Humboldt Park is a large site with 21 exam rooms. Approximately 35,000 patient visits are conducted there annually.

There is no easy flick of a switch to launch an EHR even if you have done it at another site within your own organization before. EMR products are not ready to go out of the box such as a software product you might puchace for your home computer. The essentials include a well organized internal implementation team with a sponsor who is an executive within the organization and an information technology team that knows what it is doing. The Alliance provided the professionals who can design the implementation, train the endusers and host the service.

Superior technical support, training and overall design and help support was provided by the Alliance throughout the process.

With the addition of Erie Humboldt Park to the electronic health record system, Erie’s 2 largest sites will provide over 80,000 patient visits annually in the electronic environment.

The Alliance-hosted EHR is on target to cover over 100,000 individual patients through over 350,000 anual patient visits in Chicago alone with its EHR. Aliance has expanded its services to host the EHR at heath centers from San Francisco, to North Carolina.

I'll post some photos soon.

Adelante!

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UIC School of Public Health Features Erie Family Health Center (and me)

My alma mater for public health is the School of Public Health at the Unversity of Illinois Chicago. A recent on line article features Erie Family Health Center and says nice things about me.

A quote from the article:

“Here in our own backyard, 1.3 million Chicago-area residents are uninsured, and one out of three of the city’s uninsured is Hispanic,” Francis said. “At Erie, we know from experience that ‘one out of three’ isn’t just a statistic. It’s a life that’s being compromised by a lack of access to medical care.”