Electronic Health Record System (EHRS) implementation for the California state prison system is expected to proceed in full during 2016 and currently is being tested at women's facilities in advance of a scheduled phased rollout at 34 adult institutions.
As part of a competitive bid initially released in 2012, California Correctional Health Care Services (CCHCS) selected Cerner Corp. to provide to provide commercial-off-the-shelf electronic health records for the prison system.
According to state records, the contract with Cerner was recently increased to $177 million — about $5 million more — to reflect project refinements. The EHRS system will support recordkeeping for approximately 125,000 inmates and as many as 3,000 end users.
"This system will provide CCHCS and CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] demonstrable and sustained benefits to patient safety, quality and efficiency of care, and staff efficiencies and satisfaction," the receiver's 30th "tri-annual" report from October 2015 says.
Health care in the state prison system was put into a federal receivership in 2006 due to litigation heard in U.S. District Court.
The receiver's report says that during 2015 the EHRS project team finalized workflows for more than 190 health-care delivery processes, such as medication administration, medical and mental health scheduling, computerized provider order entry, and chronic care management.
The EHRS system is believed to have integrated patient appointment scheduling, pharmacy dispensing and medication delivery, and other core functions. EHRS is a component of a larger enterprise transformation project called the Electronic Correctional Healthcare Operational System (ECHOS).
Via the 2012 bid, CCHCS said it "seeks to procure a software solution including licenses, hardware (as
proposed by bidder), implementation, and maintenance and support services that leverage CCHCS’ existing infrastructure or is hosted offsite on vendor’s hardware."
