The Big Gamble

Will stimulus dollars pay off in ways health information consumers can use?

CHICAGO, June 3, 2009—Shortly after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed in February, there was a government affairs retreat of the eHealth Initiative to discuss concern regarding the $19 billion allocated for health information technology.  A feature article in the June issue of the Journal of AHIMA examines conclusions policy makers made about the investment in health IT and how to engage healthcare consumers in productive use of it.

Primarily, the concern is whether the stimulus investment is enough to assist the electronic health records being provided to hospitals and smaller offices, thus meeting the goal of health IT to provide more efficient, less expense, and better quality health and healthcare for consumers.

The Big Gamble discusses legislative language that states one of the key purposes of ARRA is to advance the delivery of patient-centered care, and the decisions the Department of Health and Human Services will make over the next year to achieve consumer’s health information needs through several strategies:

• Offer technical assistance and endorse technologies, content and best practices that facilitate proactive delivery of timely information to consumers
• Conduct focus groups and structured interviews with consumers to better understand where health IT can serve their health needs
• Translate medical language into understandable information with the use of text, graphics, audio and video, and
• Design toolkits for consumer outreach

Also discussed are the health IT provisions in ARRA that require physicians to demonstrate meaningful use of electronic health records to qualify for up to $44,000 in adoption incentives. Overall, clinicians should get credit for EHRs that provide meaningful information to consumers, therefore, if health IT tools are not helping consumers make better decisions and manage their health then the tools are not meaningfully changing healthcare.

Read the complete article in the June issue of the Journal of AHIMA or online at journal.ahima.org.

About AHIMA

The American Health Information Management Association is America’s leading professional society whose mission is to “improve healthcare by advancing best practices and standards for health information management and [serve as] the trusted source for education, research and professional credentialing.” AHIMA represents more than 53,000 specially educated HIM professionals who serve healthcare and the public by managing, analyzing and utilizing data vital for health system management. www.ahima.org