The Indiana Health Information Exchange has launched the Quality Health First program to supply doctors with current information about their patients from many sources, including insurance claims, laboratory test results, prescriptions and imaging.

The health information exchange offers the service for free to primary care doctors in the Indianapolis area. Officials said 700 physicians are already taking advantage of the program.

The data comes from the Indiana Network for Patient Care, one of the country's largest repositories of health care records. The Regenstrief Institute, a nonprofit organization devoted to health care improvement, created the repository.

The institute will demonstrate Quality Health First at the Nationwide Health Information Network Forum in Washington next month. Institute officials said it could be replicated elsewhere.

In 2009, the Indiana HIE plans to expand the program to the rest of Indiana and to specialty care physicians. The program's goal is to improve the quality of patient care while making it easier for doctors to understand their patients' conditions and previous care.

Information is delivered monthly on each patient, either on paper or electronically. It includes reminders for doctors about patients' needs for follow-up care and preventive screenings, such as mammograms and colonoscopies.

For patients with chronic conditions such as asthma or heart disease, doctors also receive summaries of how those patients are doing as a group and in comparison to other doctors' patient populations.

In addition to receiving more complete information about their patients, doctors can report quality data for Medicare bonuses to the Indiana HIE, which is recognized by the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative. Patient data also might help doctors earn quality incentive bonuses from other insurers.

"Primary care physicians have more pressure to see more patients in less time," said Dr. Timothy Hobbs, chief executive officer of Community Physicians of Indiana, in a statement. The group of 178 physicians is participating in the Quality Health First program. "Increasingly, these patients have complex health histories, with one or more chronic diseases. The key to this program is that the information follows the patient, providing a much more accurate view of patients' health and wellness needs."

The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation provided a grant of $2 million and the Regenstrief Foundation provided a grant of $1.7 million to develop Quality Health First.