"In Houston, while I was there on one of my visits, I saw a hospital that was functioning with the rhythm of a major city emergency room processing hundreds of patients per hour, giving them care in a way that demonstrated their abilities as a community," Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt told reporters in a news teleconference last week.

"At one point they pulled back a drape and there were 50 computers. I asked what they were being used for. They said, 'We have connected them into our hospital authority and they are creating electronic medical records.'"

Adjacent to the Houston shelter was a mobile building set up by Siemens containing laboratory equipment and computers.

"Within 48 hours, they had put electronic medical records into place," Leavitt continued. "They were using state-of-the-art laboratory equipment, and they were sending the lab results to the hospitals electronically, having (them) interpreted, and moving back to the center where they were included in the electronic medical records."

HHS estimates that evacuees currently are being housed in all 48 states outside of Louisiana and Mississippi, including about 200,000 or more in Texas - though officials admit it is difficult to place exact numbers on evacuees in specific locations.

"I think I can say with some certainty that we are not at a steady state yet," Leavitt said. "People are moving around. They may have been evacuated to Houston, stayed there for a couple of days, and then made contact with a relative in Michigan and moved to Michigan, where they're staying in someone's spare bedroom. Others have evacuated farther north or farther west and then, as things cleared up, have moved back into a place in the Lafayette or Monroe or Shreveport (La.) area."

Electronic medical records are portable and can be accessed anywhere, and although their need might have been evident before the killer hurricane, the fact that evacuees might be on the move makes EMRs even more essential.

If nothing else, electronic records reduce the amount of tests, procedures and vaccinations that otherwise would have to be performed on evacuees. For example, a blood test taken in Houston will not have to be repeated in Michigan if the evacuee is transferred, because the patient's EMR will contain the test results.

"A survey shows 30 (percent) to 50 percent of patients carry their own personal health records," Dr. David Brailer, the Bush administration's national coordinator for health-information technology, told United Press International. "Essentially, it means my data follow me."

Brailer has said he wants a health-information infrastructure created for the people of the Gulf Coast. If so, he said, something good might come from Hurricane Katrina: the creation of a Gulf Coast regional health network of EMRs. The potential usefulness in a natural disaster would make the concept of health IT real to all in the healthcare industry, he said, "and not just an abstraction."

"Companies facing catastrophic data loss from Katrina and Rita can take comfort in the realization that more than 90 percent of all information is now electronic and often can be recovered," said Peter Vogel, attorney at Gardere, Wynne and Sewell in Dallas.

"The question of what these companies and their lawyers did to preserve electronic records will be posed. Recent cases involving the willful destruction of evidence may impact companies that did nothing to protect electronic evidence in the path of a hurricane."

The U.S. healthcare industry, however, has been the last to adopt heath IT to keep patients' records - except for billing. Computers have been in physician's offices and hospitals for decades - provided by insurance companies to facilitate billing.

Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the federal government decided to jumpstart health IT because of the difficulty - verified once again by Katrina - of treating patients if their paper medical records were inaccessible after a disaster. Last year President George W. Bush appointed Brailer to implement his goal of having most Americans have electronic medical records by 2014.

Alex Cukan covers healthcare matters for UPI.

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