A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to order California to release tens of thousands of prison inmates will have a sobering impact on many state prison systems, including Georgia’s.
The California decision represents one of the largest prison releases in U.S. history and was driven the court majority said by “overcrowding, which has caused suffering and death.” A federal overseer said earlier that California’s prison system should consider freeing the sickest inmates to cut costs.
Faced with a rapidly growing and aging prison population, Georgia and other states are scrambling for ways to provide economical and quality health care services that are eating up 10 percent of their correctional budgets and rising.
In Georgia, one in 70 Georgians are behind bars, according to the Pew Center on the States. Locking up someone in Georgia costs an average of $49.35 a day and the state has more than 60,000 inmates for a $2,961,000 daily tab adding up to more than $1 billion a year.
Gov. Nathan Deal is pushing to increase alternative programs and at his urging the last session of the Georgia General Assembly appointed a panel to study and propose improvements. These include day-reporting centers, drug and mental health courts and intensive probation, among others.
Georgia and a few other states are already a step ahead through the use of electronic medical records (EMR), telemedicine, managed care and other computer-based systems in their correctional facilities to help quell burgeoning costs while simultaneously providing quality care.
These systems enable correctional facilities to diagnose and treat inmates in-house, thereby reducing the need for transportation and security to transfer them to outside medical facilities. It enables health care providers to better document patient care and to have access to their charts from anywhere in the world, allowing them to easily and cost effectively prepare, review, plan and treat inmate medical, dental and mental health problems.
In addition, it reduces doctor and nurse time, offers supply and overhead savings and virtually eliminates medical errors and unfavorable outcomes of inmate lawsuits.
Health care expenditures will continue to increase rapidly as prison populations swell due to aging, tougher sentencing laws, longer prison sentences, as well as increases in chronic illnesses diabetes and heart disease, infectious diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis and mentally ill and homeless patients being housed in prisons and jails.
The Georgia Department of Corrections, recognized as being one of the most efficiently run prison systems in the country in terms of cost, also is recognizing the value of information technology to manage cost, improve quality and expand its reporting capabilities. Georgia recently renewed a contract that enables it to offer state agencies access to electronic medical record systems as a way to achieve cost savings while improving quality in state health care settings.
It didn’t have to look far. The Georgia Department of Economic Development, the Metro Atlanta Chamber and the Technology Association of Georgia, or TAG, say the state is in the national forefront of health care information technology. A Georgia Tech survey claims it is one of the fastest-growing sectors in the state, employing 10,000 people.
The adoption of electronic medical record systems will not only lead to major health care savings for Georgia and a boon for the state’s health care IT industry, but it will reduce medical errors and improve efficiency and health.
Albert Woodard is CEO of Atlanta-based Business Computer Applications Inc., a major provider of e-medical systems.
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