Has Healthcare Reform Already Passed?

While the Senate continues to debate the contours of health insurance reform (i.e. public option or no public option), I have recently come to the conclusion that healthcare reform has largely already been passed and approved. ARRA—or the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—included significant funding for a variety of projects that, once implemented, will dramatically change the healthcare landscape. The section of ARRA is known as the HITECH Act, or “Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act”

This act does a number of things from an administrative perspective, but I want to highlight for a moment some of the ways in which different provisions of the act are intended to work together. In particular I want to focus on electronic medical records.

From an administrative perspective, the HITECH Act is in the process of defining interoperability standards for healthcare data. These standards are important because they are defining the ways through which healthcare information can and will be shared across different healthcare entities. For example, right now, there are no common standards for sharing electronic healthcare information between a clinic and a hospital—they must be worked out on a case by case basis. Defining interoperability standards can change that.

But this effort also dovetails nicely with efforts on a few other fronts: 1) to establish and build upon the network of health information exchanges (HIEs), 2) to create regional “extension programs” to provide technical assistance related to Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) to individual practices, 3) to provide incentive payments to small practices who purchase EMRs.

This may not be health CARE reform, but it is health INFRASTRUCTURE reform—and this, more than the expansion of healthcare coverage being debated by the Senate now—has the potential to change healthcare practice.