Welcome to the Health IT Buzz Blog, a service of HHS’s Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). This blog was created to answer your questions about the nation’s transition to electronic health records and to create a conversation about the challenges and successes health care providers, physicians, practices, and organizations are experiencing as they transition from paper to electronic health records.
Latest Buzz Posts
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ONC’s Work to Stimulate Innovation and Diffuse EHR Best Practices
A recent New Yorker article by Atul Gawande skillfully draws an analogy between today’s health care crisis and the food crisis our country faced a century ago. Whereas the heath care system currently consumes about 17% of the U.S. economy, Americans spent more than 40% of their income on food at the turn of the last century. Like our current health care system, there existed a huge chasm between what science suggested could be achieved in improved quality and productivity and how farmers dispersed throughout the country were actually practicing.
Gawande describes how the federal government developed the agricultural extension program to bring the latest science to real-world practice. By finding practicing leaders in the community, developing pilot projects, providing implementation expertise and technical assistance, and continuously building on what was learned, these regional extension centers developed best practices that ultimately became embedded into U.S. farming practice. A century later, food consumes just 8% of household income.
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Expanding and Strengthening the Health IT Workforce
Today the administration announced two additional programs to support the development of the skilled workforce needed to support broad adoption and use of health IT. Awards totaling $32 million to establish or expand university-based health IT training programs and $6 million dollars to develop a health IT competency testing program will complement the previously announced workforce development program grants established through the Recovery Act.
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The ONC Commitment to Transparency
As we work to encourage the meaningful use of health information technology, we want to hear what you have to say. That’s why we started this blog and it’s why we have worked so hard to ensure our process for moving forward is open and transparent. Today, I want to address another step we’re taking to bring more Americans into the conversation about health IT.
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Health IT Innovation is the Key to Care
As Americans, we realize the importance of relentless innovation. A key component of securing a healthy future for all Americans relies on harnessing innovation in health IT.
The new Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program announced today and funded at a level of $60 million through the HITECH Act, is designed with this purpose in mind. This program will fund projects in areas of research where breakthrough advances are needed to address barriers in health IT adoption. Addressing these breakthrough areas will require the most advanced thinking the nation can bring to bear.
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ONC Local Grants Announcement
At ONC, we’re making tremendous progress to achieve our goals and today, I wanted to provide a quick update and an important new announcement.
