Healthcare IT stimulus funding: Show me where to put the money

NASHVILLE – Now that the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been signed into law, what does it mean for the healthcare industry, particularly for healthcare IT?

Providers and other healthcare IT stakeholders should focus on five areas that will likely be targeted by healthcare IT funding, said John Tempesco, vice president of Client Services and Marketing for Informatics Corp. of America, or ICA.

Ready-to-go healthcare IT projects that prevent medical mistakes, provide better patient care, promote preventative care, evaluate the most cost-effective healthcare treatments and drive cost-savings efficiencies will not only provide ROI but create jobs as well, he said.

Vendors should encourage their customers to expand healthcare IT projects and get them in place to be "shovel ready" for when the funding becomes available, he said.

"Because the focus is shifting away from automating the business of medicine to the clinical practice of medicine, the emphasis is now on informatics," Tempesco said.

Congress and demonstration projects by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, have been focusing on clinical results and how physicians use information in healthcare IT platforms to reduce errors, make better-informed clinical decisions and deliver workflow efficiencies, he pointed out.

As a result, clinical informatics will be an area of job creation, he said. With increased physician involvement in the selection and deployment of solutions, hospitals should strengthen the relationship between their clinical and IT staffs. That will require clinical application specialists and medical technicians to help train staff.

What's missing in the healthcare industry is the actual teaching and translation of how providers use healthcare IT solutions in their daily workflow to make incremental changes in their businesses, he said. "There are not enough clinical application specialists in most hospitals," he said.

Tempesco expects stimulus funding to flow to community projects. ICA is already seeing a lot of Requests for Proposals from states, including Kentucky, Mississippi and Louisiana, for statewide health information exchanges, or HIEs. "Any time you talk about HIEs, it requires vendors producing data inputs and outputs, and hospital staff doing integration, implementation and training," he said.

Tempesco has a word of caution for those giddy with the forthcoming healthcare IT funding. "My biggest fear is that we dump money into projects that don't have sustainability plans," he said, referring to the community health information networks, or CHINs, that received government funding but failed in the 1990s.

If initiatives stick to the five key areas, Tempesco said, those projects would glean value.