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rick.merritt
Any reactions to the 2.3 percent medical devices tax?
resistion
Any doctor anywhere anytime - if this new electronic recordkeeping facilitates ...
Health care bill a mixed bag in U.S.
Rick Merritt
7/23/2010 2:03 PM EDT
One bright light for technology is that the bill sets aside $27 billion to provide incentives of $44,000 to $64,000 for doctors to adopt digital records
"Less than 10 percent of doctors practicing for hospitals have comprehensive digital heath care systems," said Paul Tang, a member of the Health IT Policy Committee that advised the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on aspects of the bill. "We can't do the reform until the electronic infrastructure is in place," he said.
The bill provides the incentives through 2014 and charges doctor's a small fee starting in 2015 if they still use paper records. It also requires doctor's to show their use of digital records is providing "a meaningful benefit" to patients before they receive the incentives.
"That’s never been done before—we've never been paid based on results," said Tang (below).
Debates have swirled around the government's recently released details that define the term "meaningful use." However Tang defended the recent language which attempts to create thresholds doctors can achieve albeit in a short time.
"By 2017, the U.S. Medicare system goes broke, so the clock we are racing against is 2017," Tang said.
Separately the bill provides about $600 million to help set up a health care exchange network. A separate package in the bill sets aside funds to train health care providers and IT experts on digital health records.
Tang also noted that a "tiger team" is working on how to keep medical records private and secure. "Audit trails [not available for paper records] can actually help with privacy breaches," he said.
"It's quite amazing how comprehensive the program is," he added.
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rick.merritt
7/23/2010 2:41 PM EDT
How is the health care bill affecting you?
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Mark Wehrmeister
7/24/2010 11:38 PM EDT
The health care bill is clearly a boost for IT vendors providing electronic medical record software and for the service providers that help implement and support these systems. It will also benefit audit firms when standards for privacy and security are put in place for anyone storing electronic medical records. There will most certainly be standards like the PCI-DSS standards currently in place for the credit card industry. What other businesses stand to benefit from the health care bill?
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7/25/2010 5:15 AM EDT
I can't imagine that the bill will accomplish its goals of increasing medical care while lowering costs, the way it's set up now. The true ways of accomplishing those goals are to increase supply and lower barriers to entry. An engineering example: I wanted to buy an EKG. Not so easy to do! I have to be an "authorized purchaser." So I bought a kit and built a rudimentary one. It's not rocket science, and it gave me a lot of information which made me into a smarter consumer of medical care. But government regulations say individuals can't be trusted to mess with forbidden knowledge.... Naturally, the price of such hard-to-get items is therefore high, but volume is low. Companies that produce such equipment may fear smaller margins, but volume, I suspect, would overcome smaller margins and push total return higher. (An example: if we cut the cost in half, but then sold 1000 times more units of product, we would make a lot more money.) But, I'm talking about diagnostic equipment, and you are talking about medical record keeping tools. Lowering barriers is still a good way to achieve higher acceptance rates and lower prices. For instance, sell systems that are driven by consumers, in that consumers carry the data that doctors generate, in a chip in their medical access card. Make the chips readable by consumers (with secure readers), sell the chips and readers directly to the consumers, reduce regulations surrounding the devices, and I expect there would be some pressure on physicians resulting from that to get on board. Patients will tend to migrate toward doctors who make life easier for them by adopting "their" system.
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resistion
7/25/2010 8:21 AM EDT
Any doctor anywhere anytime - if this new electronic recordkeeping facilitates that it will be a boon.
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rick.merritt
7/25/2010 10:41 AM EDT
Any reactions to the 2.3 percent medical devices tax?
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