Healthcare facilities along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi are still struggling to come to terms with the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina.

When Katrina roared across Mississippi in August 2005, the Coastal Family Health Center, based in Biloxi, Miss., served a population of over 30,000 patients.

Katrina destroyed two of Coastal's seven permanent and school-based locations, its entire IT and billing system, two mobile healthcare units, and significantly damaged the buildings and destroyed the contents of almost all other locations. The storm also displaced 60 of Coastal's 175-person staff.

"The mass destruction was overwhelming immediately after Katrina," said Joe Dawsey, Coastal's CEO. The storm caused an estimated $81.2 billion in damage across the Gulf Coast region, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

But while devastated three years ago, Coastal is in the midst of an impressive rebuilding effort.  The CHC has opened three new permanent clinics in Biloxi, Bay St. Louis and Moss Point, and healthcare IT will play a significant role in each, and across the entire Coastal enterprise.

"We lost up to 60,000 paper medical records due to the storm surge after Katrina," said Chuck Clark, Coastal's director of information systems. "We were completely reliant on our paper records, so we have to start over."