The treatment and medication records of many of them -- those who had previously been treated in one of 18 hospitals in the city -- were immediately available to physicians via a citywide electronic medical records system.

The 11-year-old EMR system is called the Indiana Network for Patient Care, or INPC. It has become a key element in a proj-ect to build a prototype system for a national movement away from paper-based medical records.

The 2-year-old Indiana Health Information Exchange is using the system with other regional health information organizations (RHIO) in California and Massachusetts. The RHIOs won the contract for the project from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

J. Marc Overhage, IHIE's president and CEO, said the organizations are using the INPC's matching algorithm for integrating patient history information from different hospitals and clinics in the HHS prototype. In addition, working with the regional health networks in California and Massachusetts will help validate some of the work IHIE has done to foster data exchange, he noted.

John Finnell, an emergency room physician at Wishard who trained in California and spent several years practicing in Minnesota, said the INPC system is ahead of those in other states. In both states where he worked previously, Finnell said, he rarely had immediate access to the clinical histories of ER patients like he does in Indianapolis.