Healthcare Technology and Obama’s "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act"
President Obama’s healthcare stimulus package will serve as a catalyst for the long-awaited shift to electronic medical records (EMR) in America. Obama addressed the American Medical Association in June and said that “We do a better job tracking a FedEX package in this country that we do tracking a patient’s health records”. Upon assuming the reigns of President, he vowed to change the way we track medical records, and guaranteed that America would move entirely to EMR by 2014. His stimulus package is a huge step in that direction.
Approximately $19 billion of federal funding is primed for investment into health information technology nationwide. The funding is dispersed across several different sectors that are each necessary components of changing the way we organize and catalog medical records.
