Three A&M professors are working to change the face of the medical field. Arun Sen, information and operations management professor is working with Dr. Robert Morrow of the Texas A&M Health Science Center and industrial engineering professor Amarnath Banerjee to create a digitized health care information resource to improve patient care.

The team received a $5.2 million grant from the federal government in April to develop one of the four Regional Extension Centers appointed to the state of Texas. The project is a joint effort between Mays Business School, the Texas A&M Health Science Center Rural and Community Health Institute and the Dwight Look College of Engineering.

“President Obama wanted 60 different centers throughout the country and pushed in almost $6 billion into these centers,” Sen said.

The focus of the Regional Extension Centers is to educate physicians about electronic health records. The federal government’s goal is to create a paperless health care system making medical records available at a state and national level, not just individual offices.

“We educate physicians to get them into the technological age,” Sen said. “There is a learning curve with physicians, which is where we come in. If the physicians are not using [computerized healthcare systems] or not using them well by 2015 the government will lower their Medicare and Medicaid pay.”

Sen and his two colleagues are working on the development of the CentrEast Regional Extension Center. This center is responsible for the region from Austin to the Louisiana border.

This project was implemented when President Obama passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The legislation included the Health Information Technology for

Economic and Clinical Health Act, which gives criteria for the improvement of health information technology in an effort to improve the health care system.