HIMSS Preview: Health Care Tech Revs Up As Stimulus Begins

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The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is a boon to health-care IT, with President Barack Obama's stimulus package promising $19 billion over the next two years to promote the adoption and use of electronic medical records (EMRs) in the U.S. and pledging as much as $50 billion more for EMRs over the next five years.

Stimulus appropriations for health-care IT don't exactly stop there, either. Everything from $2 billion in yet-to-be-written grants from the Department of Health and Human Services to various agency upgrades with health-care concerns is expected to get a piece of the pie, and health-care interests in the energy and green initiative sides of the stimulus also are at stake.

But as the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society's (HIMSS) 2009 conference gets underway in Chicago on Sunday, everyone from solution providers to CIOs to IT vendors with skin in the game seems to be of the same mind-set: We need more information, but we're going to do the best we can with what we know now.

EMRs are driving the broader health-care IT push. Data from IDC puts the EMR market at a growth rate of 15 percent a year, expected to reach $4.85 billion by 2015. About six percent of U.S. hospitals overall report having comprehensive EMRs, and 17 percent of physician practices do, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.

But "having an EMR" is still itself a matter of perspective, and what isn't known, for starters, is what will constitute "meaningful use" of an EMR. Part of the stimulus health-care IT funds will come in the form of incentive payments of, on average, $40,000 to physician practices, for example, who can demonstrate "meaningful use" of an EMR.

"But there has to be something in place so someone can't buy Microsoft Word and keep their notes in Word and say the fact that they're keeping medical notes in Word qualifies for a rebate," said Jack Smyth, CEO of EMR vendor Spring Medical Systems. "We have to keep track of quality reporting metrics -- those will be part of what the 'meaningful use' requirements are and things we have to keep track of."

Here's what has changed, at least from a mind-set perspective. Already, the cost of EMR implementation will come down as more implementations take place. What that means is that the formerly prohibitive cost of EMRs for a four-physician practice will be less expensive.

"Now that the cost might be less of a barrier, [VARs] play a critical role," said Frances Dare, director of health-care consulting at Cisco Systems' Internet Business Solutions Group. "How to get the systems in place, how to do training -- there's a planning piece that's vitally critical. The legislation says you need an EMR, but physicians don't want to be in the business of IT. Small practices don't have a staff that can do the IT work. They need help getting up to speed."

"It's fascinating how many VARs I run into who don't want anything to do with health care," said Wesley Gipe, president and CEO of AgilIT, a Troy, Ohio-based solution provider and EMR specialist. "It's demanding. You take a lot of flak that's not due you and it's high maintenance. But once they trust you -- and that takes a long time with physicians -- and you hold your ground on a solution that will perform like you said it would, you're in. Health care is great from that perspective."

Next: Where The Money Is

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