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KAREN FOX: The Beacon Community of the Mississippi Delta
is a large geographic community over 18 counties.
It's a farming community.
It's probably the most fertile land in the country.
In the Delta, we have one primary care physician
to every 10,000 patients.
And so people don't catch the chronic diseases.
Our in-patient days are a lot greater,
our emergency room visits are a lot greater,
because there's not enough
primary health care to go around.
The main innovation that we're putting together
is to have the physicians be able to communicate
with each other, and to communicate
with their hospitals and their laboratories
and their health centers around the Delta,
to be able to talk to one another and share data.
It normally took us about 8 weeks
to put a health care physicians' group
up on electronic health records.
And these providers, it takes about 2 weeks.
They know how much it will help them.
We're already seeing advances in how economical it is,
how efficient physicians are in seeing their patients.
We really think Beacon Community will allow
physicians to be a lot more efficient,
to catch things that they wouldn't have caught,
to see more patients in a day,
because they're aided by this technology.
It's really going to help the patients make a better decision,
because they're getting better information.