The passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes landmark legislation designed to promote the use of healthcare information technology (HITECH) for all healthcare providers. As you know, our struggling economy is on everyone's mind these days . . . and for good reason. All you have to do is look at the stock market to see that the global economy is consistently reacting to any and all economic news. As a result of this, President Obama has introduced and recently signed into law a new stimulus package to address our economic woes. This legislation will provide “incentives for the rapid implementation and meaningful use of technology to reduce healthcare costs by improving quality, safety and efficiency.”
This is excellent news for all of us who are focusing on the healthcare industry -- particularly those of us who are focused on improving business processes through the use of technology.
The hope is that with this stimulus money, the healthcare industry will be incented to successfully implement the right technology to make healthcare safer and more streamlined. I believe that an additional benefit will be to help continue the fight for more safeguards around personal data. Further, my personal hope is that this initiative will curb the zillions of paper-based processes that every medical doctor puts patients through today.
As a recent Business Wire article reports, “The HITECH stimulus provisions call for reimbursement incentives up to $64,000 per physician based on meeting certain criteria. Hospitals can qualify for $2 million-$8 million in funding. The incentives take effect October 2010 for hospitals and January 2011 for physicians.”
The article also talks to how McKesson has introduced a program to encourage its customers to take advantage of this stimulus program. As Pamela Pure, president of McKesson Technology Solutions states: “The HITECH incentives represent a significant step toward enabling healthcare that’s safer, more efficient and better connected. By greatly lowering the barrier created by cost, the stage is set to accelerate the adoption of IT, particularly among physicians, the great majority of whom still rely on paper to practice medicine. We also believe the incentives will be a strong catalyst to drive the workflow changes necessary for hospitals to embrace computerized physician order entry and physician documentation in order to fully automate the health system’s EHR (electronic health records).”
It’ll be very interesting to see how quickly the healthcare community picks up on this. I know I’m going to do my part to educate all who I can (hence this blog post!) to help prepare those who I work with so that they can take advantage of this program all while improving services to their valued patients. From my perspective, this program is a definite win-win scenario!