How ARRA Impacts Health Care IT

ARRA has provided funding to begin standardizing electronic health records for all Americans. Eventually, if you live in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, and are visiting Scranton, Pennsylvania, where you get sick and must be hospitalized, your medical records will be available to the doctors at your hospital electronically. Your care improves, because duplicate tests can be eliminated, medical errors can be reduced, and your care when you return home can be coordinated with the appropriate doctors. That's the concept.

ARRA authorizes health IT spending as $87.9 billion for Medicaid, $39 billion to extend healthcare coverage to the unemployed, $21 billion in COBRA subsidies, and $22.8 billion to expand and modernize health IT. Another $25.5 billion, more or less, is spread out for other healthcare-related spending.

Sound like Big Brother is watching you? All of your information, available for the picking. Well, Congress has increased privacy laws for personal health information (PHI). There are also civil and criminal penalties for the misuse of PHI. Maybe they can safeguard our information, maybe not. All I can say is that privacy issues held up this sort of information technology reform for years, and the safeguards in the law were apparently sufficient to overcome those concerns in Congress.

You can read more about PHI privacy here.