Health Providers to Embrace Health IT Incentives

A look at the week of January 17, 2011, in public advocacy for the IT channel

An overwhelming majority of hospitals and many private practices are jumping at the opportunity to register for federal incentive payments for adoption and meaningful use of certified electronic health records.  Tech companies are proposing their own economic stimulus – more domestic investment in return for lower taxes.  The U.S. Department of Treasury became the first federal agency to use Amazon Web Services to transfer their operations to the cloud.

Health Providers to Embrace Health IT Incentives – Federal officials say four-fifths of the nation's hospitals and 41 percent of private practice doctors are planning to take advantage of government incentives to switch to electronic health records as funding becomes available for the first time, Tech Daily Dose reports. Under the 2009 economic stimulus package, eligible hospitals may now receive millions of dollars to help implement new IT programs while individual practitioners may receive thousands of dollars in support.

Tech Companies Spearhead New Kind of Stimulus — Seeking better relations with the Obama administration, technology companies with sizable overseas operations are floating a compromise: a temporary tax holiday for American corporations in exchange for more domestic investment, says Tech Daily Dose. High-tech companies state that it would be a good deal for the United States, providing a much-needed economic boost.

Treasury Moves to the Cloud — The U.S. Department of the Treasury is moving four existing sites into the Amazon Web Services cloud, and will work with the company to host a new agency website. The U.S. government is trying to move more of its information into cloud-based computing, says The Washington Post, and a recent policy initiative from U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra gave all federal agencies three months to pick three services to shift to Web-based computing.