By Todd Park and Peter Basch May 2009
The $19 billion health information technology investment authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s HITECH program resents a landmark opportunity to catalyze improvement of our nation’s health care system. This key piece of President Obama’s policy agenda encourages doctors and hospitals to embrace health IT solutions in order to strengthen and modernize the infrastructure upon which our health care system runs.
This critical health IT investment program will fail, however, if it is treated as a pure technology implementation program. Indeed, failure is effectively guaranteed if the HITECH program embraces technology adoption for the sake of adoption. But if this new health IT investment program is wedded to a strong commitment to provider payment reform in forthcoming health care reform legislation and implemented specifically as an accelerator of health care delivery innovation and payment reform, then the investment program can help transform U.S. health care as we know it.
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