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DAVID KENDRICK: Tulsa is a very interesting geography.
JOSEPH WALKER: You've got all the benefits of a large city, but you've got
the feel of a small town.
KENDRICK: Between two zip codes in Tulsa,
there's a 14-year difference in life expectancy.
We've discovered that the immunizations for adults
don't really get recorded well.
We don't know who's not getting them.
They're critical, because missing a vaccination
can literally cost an elderly person their life.
While we have great individual doctors
and great individual hospitals, as a community, we were not
working together well to coordinate care.
We needed to move data about patients
to where it needed to be.
Almost every visit for every patient in the community
is a brand-new experience.
Patients had to deliver this data manually
over and over and over
to other people in the health care system.
We decided that our number-one objective was
to implement the infrastructure
to move data where it needed to be.
We want to leverage technology
to enable communications between patients and providers,
and then doctors and one another.
We feel like we're going to make things
more efficient for patients.
Now when I refer a patient to a specialist,
we communicate electronically
before that patient ever arrives.
Patients can get in to get seen sooner
if their care warrants it.
This system has allowed us
to do a better job of coordinating care,
and this is one of the ways
we can make the delivery of care more accurate,
higher quality, lower cost, and more efficient.