More news and commentary on the Electronic Healthcare Records part of Obama’s stimulus plan of interest to the storage industry. As you may or may not know, $20 billion has been set aside in an effort to fully digitize healthcare records.
As HealthImaging & IT Reports, the plan could result in something of a limbo situation in terms of who will oversee it–especially since it’s still not clear who the next Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary will be following Tom Daschle’s withdrawal.
Meanwhile, Jerome Wendt and Howard Haile posted a very detailed piece on the DCIG blog today about the implications of the plan. One area that could be of concern, say Wendt and Haile, is the language in the bill that states that patients will be afforded full transparency:
“This language basically states that a patient will have the right to receive an audit trail of all disclosures of their EHR made through electronic record. This paragraph stunned us as we immediately thought of the many facets of IT this would touch.”
All in all, this is shaping up to be quite an earth-shaking new mandate. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds–who will benefit from these dollars, and whose resources will be stretched.
Image: http://rrig.blogspot.com/
