Jeff Rowe

A number of hospitals in Northwestern Indiana are deploying EHRs or integrating disparate EHR systems across their facilities to qualify for the federal stimulus funds. They're not implementing purely for the money. Do the math.

CMS announced it will spend $34 million to have Northrop Grumman track health IT incentive payments. It seems as if the last several months millions of dollars have been pouring out of HHS. For those who are opposed to all this spending, this announcement may seem like the federal government is pouring more money into a bottomless pit.

The Dept. of Health and Human Services is going to be conducting two surveys on patient perceptions of EHRs. Getting patient buy-in is just as critical as having physicians adopt health IT. It's one thing to get physicians to use the system. It's another thing if patients don't want their physicians to have electronic records on them.

For healthcare policymakers, the perfect world would probably include a healthcare sector in which providers of all sizes worked together to make the transition to new HIT as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Another misguided, uninformed EHR vendor will discount the price of EHR software for doctors willing to sell patient data! According to CEO Jonathan Bush, "Athena might be able to halve the amount that physicians pay to use its EHR."

With electronic patient records, the potential for privacy violations expands a thousand-fold. First, data can be accessed anywhere, not just on the physical premises. As a result, remote access makes snooping employees bolder.

Amid an economy still recovering from a deep recession, students participating in the University of California San Diego Extension Health Information Technology Program are very lucky.

I have not read the report by the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University that demonstrates EHRs in some cases can impose higher costs to hospitals and lower quality of care. That said, I have some concerns about the study.

When you read articles about physicians who aren't going to make the switch to electronic health records, it's always interesting to note the age of the nay-sayers. I'm not trying to start a war between generations, but age has a lot to do with refusal to adopt health IT.

Since the passage of the HITECH provisions of last year’s ARRA, the Obama administration has taken significant steps in several directions toward hastening the implementation of new HIT across the healthcare sector.