Experts and federal officials close to the issues surrounding healthcare IT adoption and the promotion of meaningful use under the new stimulus package say the goals are high, but the work that lies ahead is monumental.
They were gathered at the 2009 Annual Conference of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, held Sept. 13-16 in Washington D.C.
“I’ve been in this field for decades, and the interest in health IT has never been stronger,” said Mark Spranca, a healthcare IT expert with Abt Associates.
According to Abt, physicians who have adopted healthcare IT may not be using it in a meaningful way yet.
“There is lots of room for improvement in healthcare IT adoption,” Spranca said. “Meaningful use is important, but we still have to focus on adoption. The industry needs to take meaningful use from a concept to an empirical reality, which is, right now, incomplete and somewhat inconsistent. We need to build electronic health records to monitor outcomes we care about.”
Tony Trenkle, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Office of e-Health Standards and Services, said adoption of healthcare IT by 2011 will be a tough task to accomplish, but “interest has never been higher.”
According to Trenkle, the HITECH Act provisions found in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) are aimed at increasing healthcare IT adoption, but they are also part of a bigger picture to lay an infrastructure for the future of U.S. healthcare.
Provider incentives for meaningful use of healthcare IT, scheduled to begin in 2011, is just a start, Trenkle said. “We know we aren’t going to be where we need to be in 2011, but it will set the stage,” he said. “Key dates for adoption will be 2015, 2017, 2019 and beyond.”
CMS officials will be issuing a proposed final rule on meaningful use by the end of the year, with the final rule to come out some time in early 2010.
The challenge will come as CMS strives to sync its efforts and create a platform for expansion without creating disincentives or unintended consequences for physicians. “This is going to be an experiment, in some ways, on a very large scale,” Trenkle said.
Micky Tripathi, CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, said even physicians who are able to reap the most incentives under the HITECH Act, will likely have to shell out $21,000 of their own money for healthcare IT. There are long-term benefits to using healthcare IT, he said, but by necessity, physicians are often focused on their bottom line.
