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Funding for Health Information Technology
ARRA includes $19 billion in funding to promote the development and implementation of interoperable Health Information Technology (HIT). The $2 billion in discretionary funds and $17 billion in investments and incentives through Medicare and Medicaid will be used to improve the quality of medical care in the U.S. and create jobs in the information technology sector. The effort will be overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT).
To promote interoperable Electronic Health Records (EHR), the bill requires federal agencies that use HIT systems to meet federal standards. Any health care payers or providers that contract with the federal government will also have to meet these standards. DHHS will be required to report within two years and then annually on the status of EHR adoption.
The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with ONCHIT to design the standards that must be met by HIT systems. NIST will award competitive grants to universities to establish multidisciplinary Centers for Health Care Enterprise Integration to generate innovative approaches to create a fully interoperable EHR network.
Several new grant and loan programs will provide incentives for the use of HIT. Funding will be made available through many DHHS agencies to build HIT architecture, EHR usage among non-Medicare/Medicaid providers, HIT training and education, telemedicine, interoperable clinical data repositories, privacy technology and best practices and HIT use at public health departments. The department will also spend $300 million to support regional health information exchanges. Other incentive programs will support:
- creation of HIT Regional Extension Centers,
- competitive grants to states and tribes to create loan programs supporting EHR adoption,
- grants to integrate HIT into medical education, and
- financial assistance to universities to create medical informatics programs.