Fall 2011 issue of Horizons

in their Medicare payment rates. Encouraging healthcare providers to deploy an EHR system is just a component of a large healthcare information technology (IT) strategic plan that is being undertaken by HHS. In the past few years, there have been two major pieces of legislation — the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (commonly known as the Affordable Care Act) — through which Congress provided the opportunity to modernize the healthcare delivery system. With this directive from Congress, HHS developed the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2011 – 2015. The chart below depicts the overall strategy for health information technology:

The goals of the information technology strategic plan are to:

1. Achieve adoption and information exchange through meaningful use of health IT

The objectives of this goal are to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records, facilitate information exchange to support meaningful use of EHR, and support IT adoption and information exchange for public health and populations with unique needs. In the future, an infrastructure would be developed so that patient information follows the patient across organizational boundaries. The development of this infrastructure will be a combination of technology and a change in organizational structures.

Federal Health IT Strategy Map

Source: HHS - The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology

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