Health Information Technology Funding

Health Information Technology (HIT) is now being implemented under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 passed by US Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.  Under this law United States Medical Community, Hospitals, Clinics, Physicians, Medical Colleges, and Medical Service Providers will be required to use Electronic Health Records (EHR) by the year 2015. The US congress has been very generous with the funding and allocated 19 billion US dollars towards this initiative. However only 9% of physicians and medical estabishments in USA as of January 2009, are using some form of Electronic Health Record system. Further, even fewer medical practitioners and hospitals are using medical cost reduction technologies such as Telemedicine to save patients, insurance companies and US Government Medicare & Medicaid programs significant amount of money. The global trend of using technology to reduce cost of medical care is a real one.  Companies such as General Electric, Intel, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bosch, Honeywell, Grameen Health, Space Hospitals and others are actively investing in health care cost reduction strategy such as Telemedicine. Several Universities and non profit organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Cleveland clinic, Eastern Carolina University, Texas Tech University and others have started implementing Telemedicine programs. This site reports education and funding information about HIT and Telemedicine. 

Medical Practices throught the world are using varierty of Health Information Technologies. In the quest to reduce cost of medical care one must identify and reduce recurring expensive and wasteful activities in the Hospitals and clinics. The highest amount of cost today in medicine is idle time of highly compensated medical professionals, costly equipment, and surgery operating rooms. In the USA the number of idle operating rooms are common. The doctor's non productive time is significant due to physicians doing the work of medical assistants or scribes. Once appropriate health information technologies and physician productivity tools such as telemedicine are introduced in daily practice cost of each medical consult will go down. By increasing the productivity of medical infrastructure the cost of providing medical services will go down. There are examples of extraordinary cost savings in delivery of medical care all over the world. US has to now adopt telemedicine as one of the main tools to deliver medical consultations to keep i) Medical professionals productive, ii) Easier, Quicker delivery of health care via telemedicine to reduce costs at hospitals and clinics. We offers know-how to implement telemedicine in number of medical specialities.