NEW YORK – The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene announced Monday that it will provide electronic medical records and practice management software to 1,300 providers caring for underserved and vulnerable populations in the City.

The Department has signed a $19.8 million deal with healthcare IT vendor eClinicalWorks of Westborough, Mass. to provide the software. The deal is part of New York City’s Primary Care Information Project (PCIP), an initiative to improve the quality of healthcare throughout the City.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has often expressed his belief in the importance of electronic records in reforming primary care.

“Getting preventive health value from EHRs is by no means automatic,” Bloomberg said at the Academy Health National Health Policy Conference in February. “But if we program and implement them with disease prevention as our goal, they can be crucial to rebuilding primary care in our nation.”

Girish Kumar Navani, president of eClinicalWorks, explained that the participating physicians will implement eClinicalWorks’ unified EMR/PM product in their varied care settings, and will have access to the company’s Patient Portal to improve interaction with patients.

The first recipients of the software will be providers at outpatient practices including Community Health Centers, correctional facilities at Riker’s Island, and hospital-affiliated outpatient ambulatory care networks.

“This is about more than just the deployment of EMRs,” said Navani. “It’s about enhancing real-time clinical decision support. I think it could actually transform chronic care management.”

Navani said that eClinicalWorks would develop a Take Care New York (TCNY) version of its EMR/PM software, and that any additions and enhancements would ultimately become part of the core product that is available to physicians across the United States.

“We’re building this enhanced product around the needs of primary care,” Navani said. “The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene wants to see how these enhancements actually improve the quality of care. It’s much more than simply aggregating patient data in a data warehouse. We want to demonstrate how EMRs can improve the quality of care.”

“Using EHRs in primary care could actually improve people’s health,” added Farzad Mostashari, assistant New York City Health Commissioner directing the City’s PCIP. “They improve care and place much-needed emphasis on preventive medicine.”

Hardware implementation and training for the initiative begins in June 2007, said Navani, and the “go-live” date is September 2007. eClinicalWorks will deploy the software to the initial cohort of physicians over the course of two years, although the possibility exists that the City may eventually fund software for more providers under the program.

Navani said that the contract includes two years of maintenance and support for each physician. The entire project is not technically free for participating providers, however, as they must provide the computer hardware. Navani estimated that the total cost for each provider would be around $4,000.

Although based in Massachusetts, eClinicalWorks intends to open an office in Manhattan in order to manage the project locally.