Billions spent on health IT stimulus could lead to major boom.... ( Boston Mass. The more than $19 bill...)

Billions spent on health IT stimulus could lead to major boom... or bust

Date:3/27/2009

Boston, Mass. The more than $19 billion dollars of funding provided for health care information technology (IT) in President Obama's economic stimulus package offers a unique opportunity to deliver on the promise of computerized health care, say researchers from Children's Hospital Boston in a Perspective article published in the March 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The co-authors argue that the development of a platform model drawing on the success of software platforms such as the one created for the iPhone could create a flexible health information infrastructure that will improve delivery of health care, increase physician productivity, foster advances in science, as well as stimulate job and economic growth.

"This is a critical point for health IT," said co-author Kenneth Mandl, MD, PhD, of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program. "Pouring money into existing health IT systems would be the most natural approach to take with the stimulus, but it may also be the wrong approach. We need to pause and make decisions that will have long-term benefits. Rather than simply deploying existing technologies we need to establish clarity on what the characteristics of an ideal system would be."

In their NEJM article, Mandl and Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, also of CHIP, propose for the government, through the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), to mandate the development of a platform that will support applications for clinical care, public health and research. Much like the software platform developed by Apple for the iPhone, or the Indivo platform created by CHIP researchers that has emerged as a model for personal health records, the co-authors encourage DHHS to mandate the creation of a platform that will support an ecosystem of applications (i.e. order entry systems, medication reconciliation systems, patient communication systems, etc.) which can be developed by existing vendors or new health IT develop
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Contact: Keri Stedman
keri.stedman@childrens.harvard.edu
617-919-3110
Children's Hospital Boston
Source:Eurekalert

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