HIPAA Blog

[ Thursday, December 11, 2008 ]

 

State Health IT Efforts: States are starting to push for health IT, according to the Government Health IT website. Here's a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures tracking the bills passed state by state.

What's in store, at the state or federal level? Will subsidies continue (carrots), or will states and the feds (particularly CMS) require adoption of IT, particularly as a condition of participation in state and federal payment systems (stick)? Here's what Peter Orszag of the CBO says:

As we seek to improve the efficiency of the health sector, let’s learn some
lessons from economics....We also have to ask how we can get toward universal
health IT. I’ll say something very unpopular: The current policy approach of
trying to encourage health IT adoption by offering institutions small subsidies
to adopt is unlikely to be effective, because it will only induce those
institutions that are close to adopting anyway. If you offer a $5,000 or $10,000
tax credit or subsidy for a health IT system, an organization would put it in
place only if it was at the margin anyway, and the extra $5,000 or $10,000 kicks
it over. Or you can offer massive subsidies--say $200,000 for a health IT
system. The problem with that is the budgetary cost becomes huge, and you’re
also buying out the base of a lot of institutions that would have adopted it
anyway. If we were really serious about getting to universal health IT quickly,
we might offer small subsidies for some period of time, as we did in the
e-prescribing legislation recently. Then we would say after three or four years,
you must have a health IT system that meets the following criteria, or you will
no longer be reimbursed under Medicare and Medicaid. Guess what? We’d get there
very fast....

Jeff [11:21 AM]

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