Project ACCESS receives $85,000 to study area rural clinics needs

The region’s medical access agency Monday received word it had won a $85,000 federal grant to study the technology issues facing rural clinics on the Palouse.

Project ACCESS is a five-year-old medical program that works to increase medical access for the region’s elderly. Funded by Whitman Hospital, Gritman Medical Center and Pullman Regional Hospital it was started in 2006 to serve both Whitman and Latah counties.

The $85,000 will be used to draw up a plan for the technology issues for rural clinics in the area.

There are eight rural clinics on the Palouse which will be studied. They include Rosalia Health Clinic, Whitman Medical Group clinics in Garfield and St. John, Tekoa Medical Clinic, Moscow Family Medicine Clinic in Troy, Potlatch Family Clinic, Kendrick Family Clinic and the Palouse Medical Clinic.

“We are using this grant money to do an assessment of this region. We’ve been in touch with the rural clinics,” said Project ACCESS grant manager Daquarii Oppegaard.

The grant was issued by the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).

Oppegaard said the grant will help pinpoint issues of rural clinics and place them in a comprehensive plan.

For example, rural clinics in Tekoa and Rosalia may have a fax machine or internet, but their remote locations might mean those communication services are unreliable.

The $85,000 grant will be managed by Whitman Hospital and all the funds must be used by next April, said Oppegaard.

“We said we are going to cast our line and see if we can get this money. And lo and behold we did,” she said.

The federal reimbursement system is requiring all hospitals to use an electronic health record system by 2014. This grant will help assess where the area clinics need help in meeting that standard in three years.

“They don’t have the software necessary to support electronic health records. We want to figure out exactly what they need,” Oppegaard said.

The majority of the grant funds will pay Oppegaard and the other Project ACCESS staff member to research the strategic plan. The funds will also go to pay for a Health Information Technology consultant to help the Project ACCESS staff.

Once the plan is written, Oppegaard said she will again apply to HRSA for a second, larger grant to put the plan into action. The plan will be written by April of next year.