July 12, 2009 By David Raths
The U.S. economic stimulus package is the biggest thing that's ever happened in health IT.
That's what Dr. Mark Leavitt says about the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) of 2009, which promises to spend nearly $20 billion on technology use in health care.
Leavitt, chairman of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology, which certifies electronic health records (EHRs), recently compared the challenge of creating a nationwide network of interoperable EHRs by 2014 to NASA's manned spaceflight mission to the moon in the 1960s.
The federal government plans to kick its purchasing power into high gear by offering Medicare and Medicaid bonuses to physicians and hospitals that demonstrate "meaningful use" of interoperable, certified EHRs starting in 2011. The stimulus package also provides billions of grant dollars to federal and state organizations for research and the promotion of health-IT adoption.
One ramification is that state CIOs will begin paying much more attention to health projects, predicts Erica Drazen, managing partner of emerging practices at research firm CSC Global Healthcare Sector. The states pay for a lot of care, she noted, and if there continue to be islands of automation that can't share data, states won't see the quality or cost improvements they hope to achieve. "For states that have made progress on health-information exchange, this is their time in the limelight," she said. "For ones that haven't made much progress, it is time to step up."
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