WASHINGTON – The nation’s healthcare IT chief says he has faith in the “inevitable advancement” of healthcare IT.
David Blumenthal, MD, spoke Dec. 4 at a conference of the National Committee for Quality Assurance.
Making healthcare IT part of the accepted culture for providing healthcare is not far off, Blumenthal said. With persistent support from the federal government, physicians will see the “value and inevitability” of healthcare IT for improving patient care, he added.
He called the era following the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) “an unprecedented opportunity” for advancing healthcare IT.
Blumenthal said medical students today are not likely to accept paper records as the standard for use in their profession when electronic means of information exchange and recordkeeping already pervade the rest of their lives.
Last February, Congress provided the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) with $2 billion in discretionary funding through ARRA to advance healthcare IT. ONC has already earmarked $235 million of that money for regional extension centers and $80 million to expand the healthcare IT workforce.
Despite the federal investment in healthcare IT advancement, Blumenthal said he envisions a time when the federal government won’t need to be involved. Providers will want to adopt healthcare IT on their own, and electronic health records will become an everyday part of practicing medicine.
Karen Milgate, director of the Office of Policy at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said providers are confused about how to get reimbursed for bonuses under ARRA. “Open meetings and parameters are all that’s available at this point,” she said of meaningful use.
CMS is working on finishing a final definition of meaningful use by Dec. 31. The government is trying to strike a balance between setting the bar low enough to encourage healthcare IT adoption and making it high enough to achieve some meaningful use of data, she said.
The goal of the HITECH incentives found in ARRA is to improve the quality of care, Milgate said.
Floyd Eisenberg, MD, senior vice president for Health Information Resources at the National Quality Forum made this analogy: Healthcare IT is like the pumpkin, and meaningful use is the pumpkin pie.
