The HITECH Act in the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama signed on February 17, 2009, provides a unique opportunity for physicians to adopt an Electronic Health Record (EHR) to improve the quality, safety, and cost effectiveness of healthcare in America.

This bill accomplishes four major goals that advance the use of health information technology (Health IT), such as electronic health records by:

• Requiring the government to take a leadership role to develop, by 2010, standards that allow for the nationwide electronic exchange and use of health information to improve quality and coordination of care.
• Investing $20 billion in Health IT infrastructure, and Medicare and Medicaid incentives as encouragement for doctors and hospitals to electronically exchange patients’ health information.
• Generating additional savings throughout the health sector, through improvements in quality of care and care coordination, also reducing medical errors and duplicative care.
• As the healthcare sector increases use of health IT, the strengthening of federal privacy and security laws will prevent identifiable health information from misuse.

These existing incentive programs can provide an additional 4% incentive to physicians at an estimated impact of $6,000 - $8,000 per physician, per year.

August 20, 2009, marked the beginning of real deployment of the HITECH Act when we received details about the release of $1.2 billion in direct funding for Health Information Technology (HIT) and Health Information Exchange (HIE) programs.

President Obama said: "This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.  It just won't save billons of dollars and thousands of jobs -- it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our medical care system".

How to get the funding? To begin with, there are four important things to understand about the program itself:

1. A practice must either accept Medicare or demonstrate a 30% Medicaid mix (20% for pediatricians) to qualify for an incentive payment. Practices can only submit under one of the programs. While the incentive pool can be up to $44,000 per physician filing under Medicare, almost 70% of the funding comes in the first two years. I t then, decreases significantly every year thereafter. In other words, the medical offices’ plan needs to be in place now to ensure they don't miss the window of time when the incentives are the greatest.

2.  Medical practices need to prove meaningful utilization, and be connected to other healthcare providers, demonstrating data exchange for the benefit of the patient. This incentive is not based on purchasing and implementing an EHR, it is about using one. So, the practices need to move fast, to ensure they have their workflows evaluated, their selection criteria developed, a vendor selected, an implementation plan developed, EHR installed, connected to other healthcare providers, and have their physicians fully functional.

3. After implementation, medical offices will be required to prove all of the above by some type of reporting requirement that will be determined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in 2010.

4. This opportunity is timed-based! For every day the implementation is delayed, the practices lose a portion of the incentive. Funding decreases over time and it will go away after 2015. They are either operational in that time period, or they lose the opportunity for the funding. In fact, penalties begin in 2015.

Benefits of acting NOW. The rapid return over investment for an EHR or EMR is already well documented and significant:

• reducing or eliminating transcription;
• more accurate coding levels through better documentation;
• staff re-alignment;
• increased productivity;
• eliminating charts pulls, supplies and space.

Keep in mind:

• Many groups break even in less than a year, and see an ongoing impact of over $20,000/MD/year;
• The service is more affordable now. Prices will increase dramatically as time goes by and the deadline to adopt an EHR will be closer;
• Every day a practice waits, is a missed opportunity to take advantage of financial incentives. The time is now!