• One of the first Urgent Care facilities to open in the United States.
• One of the first free-standing, independently owned, non-hospital affiliated Urgent Care facilities to open.
• One of the first medical practices to break the long established, unwritten medical professional code of ‘no advertising (perceived or otherwise) by running educational and promotional articles in our local newspapers.
• One of the first medical practices in our community to have put up a website.
• One of the first medical practices in Southern California to have begun using electronic medical records.

Pursuing our continued interest in evaluating and implementing innovations that can lead to better delivery of quality patient care, within the next several months VHMA will be making available to you, our patients, a next generation Web 2.0 ‘HIPAA secure’ website through which several on-line applications will allow our patients to:

• More conveniently communicate with our practice and our providers
• Access and grant access to portions of their personal health records should they so desire (Convenient and important while away from home)
• Have personalized health related information from trusted sources, and specifically pertinent to them, delivered to their on-line ‘Personal Healthcare Manager’.
• Authorize us to more efficiently share pertinent portions of their secure medical records on-line with their specialists or consultants.
• Through the functionalities found in today’s various popular social media applications, that will be securely integrated into our website, they will be able to ‘collaboratively communicate’ with any one individual or groups of individuals that, for instance, may have experienced or are experiencing what they may be going through or care about.
• Take a more active role in managing their own healthcare, if so desired
• Opt to receive by secure email important and timely VHMA healthcare alerts, a periodic newsletter, as well as periodic healthcare related service promotions and/or discounts.

We are very excited about bringing all of the above and other exciting Web 2.0 functionalities to our patients via VHMA’s new website. We truly feel that properly used, technology can help improve the manner in which healthcare is delivered, the actual quality of medical care, as well as the quality of the `customer/patient' service and experience we provide you. Keep watching for future announcements regarding updates to our site.