The governor of Oregon included $3 million in the 2015-17 proposed state budget to digitize the EMR system in the state's prisons, according to the Statesman Journal.
The medical records of the state's 14,600 inmates are managed, stored and transferred between Oregon's 14 prisons manually, and some inmate files are hundreds of pages long.
The new system will digitize the inmates' records and more than 40,000 files on former inmates over time. To start, the state plans to enter only new charts and charts for inmates with chronic conditions into the digital system. Full conversion of all existing paper files will take years, according to the report.
The upgrade will allow the state to share inmate patient data more easily, track health trends and provide inmates with medical records upon release.
The Oregon Department of Corrections plans to look for bids at the end of the summer, said Steve Robbins, head of the department's health services division, in an interview with the Journal. The new system is expected to launch by 2016, according to the report.
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